The microcosm of the artist Kerstin Brätsch

In 2023, for the premiere of the Tiemann Prize, the Museum Folkwang in Essen used the money to purchase four paintings by the Berlin-based painter Armin Boehm. Last year, the Magdeburg Art Museum convinced the jury with its request for a work by Özlem Altin, who also lives in the capital.

This time the attention fell on Kerstin Brätsch, who started an unusual project in 2007: Together with Adele Röder, she founded “Das Institut” as a creative place where fashion, stage sets and design objects were incorporated into the visual arts.

A short circuit between disciplines that shapes Brätsch’s work to this day. She still combines a wide variety of techniques – so it’s no wonder that Marta Herford, a house for art, design and architecture, is interested in her work.

He now owns two stucco marble pictures, object-like and with surfaces reminiscent of fossils or polished gemstones. As if Kerstin Brätsch had broken down her own multicolored brush strokes into a puzzle and not put them back together accurately. Except that it’s never about the quick, picturesque gesture. Everything in her pictures is thought out and carefully arranged.

The two works acquired with the help of the Tiemann Prize are called “Fossil Psychic for Christa” and are part of a series from 2020. Brätsch used plaster, pigments, glue, wax, oil and felt. Such mixtures are typical for the artist, born in 1979, who commutes between Berlin and New York and has just opened a major solo show at the Bonn Art Museum.

These are a lot of arguments for a purchase, especially since Marta Herford’s collection is still dominated by male artists of the 20th century.

What is special, however, is the decision to hang Brätsch’s pictures in the museum café, which is accessible to everyone, even without an admission ticket. With the decision, the house follows the Brätsch, which has the categories of high and low always questioned.

But it also cleverly fulfills one of the Tiemanns’ requirements. The couple, who founded a foundation for education, art, monument preservation and nature conservation in 2018, want a permanent presence for the works acquired with their help. What’s not easy in the café: Museum architect Frank Gehry, similar to Bilbao, designed curved walls that don’t make it easy for art.

Brätsch works against this, the photo duo has become a whole installation – with photo wallpaper, the “fossils” and several small-format pictures that Marta Herford also purchased. Everything meshes together, the motifs repeat and reflect each other, microstructures become macro patterns and transform the wall into a cosmos of color, surface, plastic elements and motifs that seem infinitely enlarged as if through a microscope.

An idea that has developed into an autonomous exhibition. If you want to see more from Kerstin Brätsch, you will have to wait until autumn 2026. In parallel to the Tiemann Prize, which Marta Herford won, Kerstin Brätsch was awarded the Marta Prize, which is awarded by the Wemhöner Foundation, a few weeks ago.

It combines with the realization of a new work for the collection as well as a solo exhibition. Then the Brätsch Festival will take place in Herford.