Gilded Cage

For the past year, I’ve been living in a house with an atelier, free of charge. This house is a non-monetary scholarship provided through a cooperation between a private investment company and the academy from which I just graduated. The building, Haus Zum Reichsapfel, dates back to 1788 and is adorned with a globus cruciger(*) on its front gate - a scenic backdrop of imperial nostalgia. Amongst bulky Gründerzeit furniture that did not belong to me, I felt surrounded by remnants of a bygone era. My circumstances led me to empathise with the predicament of a court painter, bound by the tastes of their patrons. I wrote my master’s thesis about the impact of systems of patronage on the legacies of two main baroque painters, Diego Velázquez and Nicolas Poussin. I observed how their paintings offer glimpses into negotiation processes with their patronal entities, an approach I sought to experiment with during my stay. The situation of Golden Age painters is not that dissimilar from the hustle culture contemporary artists partake in. In my paintings for the Gilded Cage, I employed baroque tropes with my own twist, hoping to better understand my position within present-day conditions of artistic production. (*) Reichsapfel: "the orb and cross", is an orb surmounted by a cross. It has been a Christian symbol of authority since the Middle Ages - the cross laid over the globus represents the dominion of Christianity over the world.