"For several weeks, artist Ekaterina Moré has been exchanging ideas with other artists in a YouTube format about how to deal with the changing art market."
by Anina Pommerenke
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My YouTube channel with artist interviews 👇
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTttNtCnUNE9tGj449HYXkJjIqOmly2oL
"Her works mostly show very beautiful and self-confident women: heavily made up - strong poses. Ekaterina Moré also presents herself this way. It's hard to believe that the artist is actually afraid of the camera. But it is precisely this fear that she now wants to confront. In the YouTube format "Unter Künstlern" (Among Artists), she interviews colleagues - on an equal footing.
"I also noticed this in my own work," she says. "Many art historians may see something different in an artist's work. As an artist, I can ask completely different questions and I have a different relationship to art. Because I also know the background."
Shirin Donia's portraits of pop culture rebels
Her conversation partners come from all over the German-speaking world and from very different art directions. Frankfurt-based Shirin Donia works with large formats. In her current series, she dedicates herself to famous rebels of pop culture: Princess Leia from "Star Wars", the "Joker" or Natalie Portman as a ballet dancer in "Black Swan". She tries to approach art as freely as possible and not to do what is expected, reports the autodidact.
Unconventional childhood as an influence on art
She also attributes this to her rather unconventional childhood: "At our house, it was a bit like a Pippi Longstocking life. We had stairs in the house, and my mom always put mattresses on them. We would climb up and then slide back down." At times, her mother would fill the entire dining room with foil and put straw in it, Shirin Donia recounts. "Then we lived there with the rabbits for weeks. So it was a bit wild."
An interesting exchange about life paths and strategies
Her vernissages are also wild, with a colorful program lasting several hours: with performing and visual arts, with music, photographers and cameras. She works with a team for three months towards such an event. Her success shows that it can sometimes be worthwhile to break with the old ways: "All this self-made - and also working commercially. For example, I also do commissioned works that don't necessarily represent my art." These are all things that are not looked upon favorably - because you bring your innermost suffering to the canvas and give it to the gallery owner for a pittance. "That would not have been my way."
The native Frenchman and Berlin-based artist Ewen Gur stands for figurative works influenced by computer games and comics. He also believes that the life of an artist has changed significantly in recent years. "Just painting a picture" - that's no longer enough: "You have to know a bit about marketing and self-marketing. Otherwise, you simply can't survive. You have to be a multitalent in this day and age."
Exciting not only for artists
Moderator Ekaterina Moré believes that not only other artists benefit from such insights: "Most artists who have been in the art market for a long time have developed good life strategies for dealing with changes." It is interesting to see how different these life strategies are. Other areas could also benefit from this, Moré believes: How does a person who thinks creatively think, and how do they deal with this issue of fear and insecurity? Her message is: Good things sometimes only arise by overcoming one's own fears. Her new series of talks is a good example of this.
NDR Kultur
To all of Ekaterina Moré's interviews with artists:
