Opening
Thursday, 19 March 2026 | 6 pm

Words of welcome
Katrin Schmidbauer, Board member Deutscher Künstlerbund
Cerstin-Ullrike Richter-Kotowski, State Secretary for Culture at the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion, CDU

Introduction      
Dr. Isa Bickmann, Curator & Art historian, Frankfurt a.M.

About the exhibition
The exhibition »ATLANTINNEN, deep dive. measuring. spirit.« concludes the focus on the theme of »Gender Equality and Visibility of Women Artists« that was chosen by Deutscher Künstlerbund for the years 2025 and 2026 to mark the 75th anniversary of its re-founding in 1950. The focus here is on »diving deep« into the world on both physical and spiritual levels. This complex theme links the three artists’ works, while also referring to the location, made visible by the coordinates given in the title (52°/13°). The selected works refer to the science of cartography and to the figure of Atlas, dealing in distinctive ways with topographic, philosophical and critical perspectives. This creates a many-facetted interplay of place, theme and artistic practice.

In their works, Elvira Lantenhammer, Monika Linhard and Zuzanna Skiba take observational, imagining and phenomenological approaches to the theme of »landscape«, exploring holistic definitions of an ever-changing world in philosophical terms and via an allocentric frame of reference.

Their chosen title »Atlantinnen« (female Atlases) is a humorous reference to the mythological figure of Atlas, the Titan who holds up the heavens and who also features as a globe bearer and supporting structure in architecture. Since the sixteenth century, Atlas has also lent his name to cartographic works. 

But the question remains: Who has been carrying the weight of the world and who continues to carry it?

This question is addressed by the performance DIE ATLANTINNEN. Directly addressing the sculpture of Atlas in Berlin’s Tiergarten park, near the Victory Column, the artists interact with the Titan symbolically and with tongue in cheek, catching the globe in their hands – the burden Atlas must carry on his shoulders.

The artists aim to develop new artistic approaches to this theme that promote the visibility of women artists. In this content, they understand the world as something that can only by moved and preserved by joint action. Their show opens up a discussion on this theme – as a productive debate and as a matter of existential importance. »ATLANTINNEN, deep dive. measuring. spirit.« presents works that broaden horizons by thinking beyond the usual boundaries. Bringing together the media of video, sculpture, painting and drawing, the exhibition is accompanied by a programme of thematically related events.

In Kakemono – Japanese Siteplan, Elvira Lantenhammer uses the form of Japanese painted scrolls to create a picture measuring 12 metres by 98 centimetres on shoji paper, realized in Fukuoka and Otsu (Japan). She also presents smaller scroll-based works. The bright colours, made using pigments with acrylic, are applied with a broad flat brush. Each brushstroke is closely connected to her breath, its gesture remaining visible. The composition is shaped by adjacent fields of colour and an intuitive choice of shades, with a deliberate emphasis on the vertical and the horizontal. One noticeable influence here is wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic and philosophical concept according to which beauty lies in simplicity, ephemerality, and imperfection. For Lantenhammer, Japan is also associated with the discovery of bright colours. Following her training in restoration, a field marked by a traditional palette, the use of bright pigments opened up new possibilities for expression, enabling the kind of intense radiance  that visualizes the strangeness, the impressions and the radically new quality of the artist’s experience of Japan

In the two works presented here, Monika Linhard uses window blinds, a material she has been working with since the early 1990s, first in plastic versions and later in aluminium. The art historian Nadine Hahn has described these works as follows: »In Inner Language, Linhard subjects the material to a stress test: two cylinders inside which the blinds are wedged and twisted into place exert pressure, generating tension. Familiar with this everyday material, viewers intuitively know that the energy stored in the blinds can be discharged by the slightest touch, causing each of the aluminium slats to shoot out of the cylinder like a spring. In contrast to this charged rigidity, the installation Double Square has a playful lightness: here, the blinds hang down loosely, moving gently in the slightest breeze. A video projected onto the installation shows the work at the edge of a forest, stretched between two pine trees. This scene is accompanied by an audio sequence combining the rattling of the blinds in the wind, the occasional cries of a bird of prey, and the acoustic atmosphere of the forest fringe into a fine, many-layered tapestry of sound.«

In his text on the »mental landscapes« of Zuzanna Skiba, entitled »Das Auge denkt weiter« (The eye keeps thinking), Stephan von Wiese describes abstract landscape painting as an artistic engagement with forces that are invisibly at work in nature, exploring inner energies, processes of growth and decay, and mysterious magnetisms. Familiar natural forms are refashioned and eliminated, replaced by free forms offering a view of the inner world of creation. In each case, a kind of second creation story is set in motion by the power of the imagination. This look inside creation, this evocation of invisible forces and energies, this artistic formulation of processes of mutation and transformation, is a central theme in Skiba’s work. In the absence of direct precursors in art history, the links are more via philosophical concerns. The work stands for itself, visualizing thought processes that are not pre-framed or pro-programmed, but that follow their own rules, their own »inner necessity«, as each new picture gradually emerges.



Supporting Program
Guided Tour by Artists Elvira Lantenhammer, Monika Linhard, Zuzanna Skiba
Friday, 20 March 2026 | 4 pm

Gallery Weekend
Guided tours of the exhibition at 3 PM each day, with the artists present:
Elvira Lantenhammer, Monika Linhard, Zuzanna Skiba
Friday, 01 May 2026 | 12 – 9 pm 
Saturday, 02 May 2026 | 12 – 7 pm 
Sunday, 03 May 2026 | 12 – 5 pm

Artists talk 
Tuesday, 16 June 2026 | 6 pm 
Topic: ATLANTINNEN, deep dive. measuring. spirit.
Moderation: Dr. Almut Hüfler 
in conversation with Elvira Lantenhammer, Monika Linhard, and Zuzanna Skiba about deep immersion in the landscape, exhibiting together as an expansion of one’s own horizon, and the challenges of continually engaging with the world anew through art.

Finissage & Presentation of the Special Edition
Thursday, 2 July 2026 | 6 pm
on the topic »ATLANTINNEN & DAS (ER)HALTEN DER WELT« (»ATLANTINNEN & PRESERVING THE WORLD«)
In the presence of the artists





Supported by funds from LOTTO-Stiftung Berlin

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