Silke Weißbach

Cadent, 2026 Oil, cellulose, cochineal, Turkish rose extract, ash, Bougainvillaea leaves, wax on canvas, stretched on aluminium stretcher bars 70 × 100 cm / 27.6 × 39.4 in

Tuesday - Try to imagine the seductive sea At the beginning of this year, I had the opportunity to spent two months at @porthmeorstudios in St Ives, immersed in the coastal landscape of Cornwall. ✨🌊 I’m sharing here a few impressions: I was inspired by the richly textured coastline—lichens clinging to stone, the shifting tides, and the constant pull of the sea. Being confronted with the ocean every day brought a profound calm; the shoreline felt like a zone of exchange, where surfaces shift and change with every passing moment. My process is about experiencing through materiality and sensation, creating spaces where imagination and transformation can unfold. These spaces are sacred and liminal, where the individual and the communal intersect, and where personal and collective narratives become relevant. Colour, texture, and scent act as bridges, helping to transcend language and logic, and creating what I think of as ‘feel spaces’—environments that foster solace, support, and interconnectedness. By constructing these spaces, I aim to catalyse personal reflection as well as collective awareness of our shared vulnerabilities, interdependencies, and aspirations. From this residency, two works emerged: ‘Us’ which was presented in the group exhibition Landscape of Time and Memory with @fredlevinegallery in their beautiful new space in Bruton in the Summer this year and ‘One More Rush’. Both were developed from daily walks along the coast, incorporating elements gathered directly from the landscape and transforming them onto the canvas. One more rush, 2025 Cochineal, Collagen, Comfort, Estrogen, Glycerin, Hyaluronic acid, Ink, Lactose, Pigments, Plant sap, Progestin, Starch on canvas 70.87 x 78.74 in / 180 x 200 cm Us, 2025 Collagen, comfort, hyaluronic acid, ink, lichens, mother of pearl, shea butter, and wax on canvas 75 x 200 cm 29 1/2 x 78 3/4 in #porthmeorstudio #fredlevinegallery #materialalchemy #livingmaterials #instagramtakeover #marcellejoseph #curatorssupportingartists #collectorssupportingartists #womensupportingwomen #womxnsupportingwomxn

Meet the Copenhagen winner of the International Art Prize presented by Winsor & Newton and Paul Smith’s Foundation, Silke Weißbach. Weißbach (b. 1984, Germany) is a London-based artist whose work engages with material transformation, emotional resonance, and ecological consciousness. Working across painting, sculpture, and video, she combines organic and synthetic substances—such as sugar, wax, seaweed, and hyaluronic acid—to explore cycles of growth, decay, and crystallisation. She studied Illustration and Sculpture in Hamburg, Germany before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2020). In 2024–25 she took part in residencies at Xenia (Hampshire), Porthmeor Studios (Cornwall), and Arizona State University’s Imagination Fellowship. Recent exhibitions include Landscapes of Time and Memory, Fred Levine Gallery (2025); At Midland Road and Ember, Informality Gallery (2025, 2024); Kooperation, Nizza Gallery, Berlin (2024); Lavender, Hibernation and Neon, Crypt Gallery (2024); Taking the Light out of the Prism, Duplex, Lisbon (2023); Homegrown, Hauser & Wirth London (2020). filming & editing by @ritaissonaive

temporary oceans - Turkish rose, sea pinks, blue bells

Lago Como

Rivers We Cannot See, 2026 @artemara.gallery

Frailed, 2026 Cellulose, oil, cochineal, turkish rose extract, ash, wax on canvas, mounted on custom aluminium stretcher bars 30 × 50 × 2.5 cm (11¾ × 19¾ × 1 in)

Rivers We Cannot See 6 February – 5 April 2026 For Rivers We Cannot See, Silke Weißbach brings together a series of abstract, colour field paintings produced over the last two years. The works unfold through sustained engagement with painting as a material, bodily, and sensory system. Over recent years, she has spent extended periods near coastlines and tidal terrains—by the Baltic Sea of her childhood, and later along the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. These journeys began as acts of departure from the studio, yet gradually revealed themselves as a form of return. What emerged was a coming home to modes of sensing and understanding. Travel operates here as a condition of thought. Immersion in humidity, salt air, shifting light, and vegetation reactivates bodily memories that precede language. Walking through pine forests with resin warming in the sun; moving through mangroves and palms dense with moisture; sensing how different environments hold water and how the body adjusts almost instinctively. These encounters produced material knowledge that later entered the work. Weißbach does not abandon the studio but reconfigures its function. It becomes a permeable threshold: What is gathered outside—matter, scent, rhythm, sensation—returns and continues to transform within it. Materials closely connected to the body and practices of care form the basis of the paintings: collagen, hyaluronic acid, wax, aloe vera, spirulina, cochineal, soap, and plant residues. These substances remain active. They bind, absorb, seep, and settle, allowing time to register physically within the surface. Water functions as a structuring force throughout the work. It shapes landscapes and circulates through bodies, linking interior and exterior systems. Blood plasma carries a salinity close to that of the primordial sea. Within the paintings, these relations appear through viscosity, opacity, staining, and sedimentation. Layers accumulate slowly, forming topologies that hold moisture differently and retain traces of pressure, touch, and duration. Like weather systems or tides, they articulate states of density, flow, and resistance.

bougainvillea bracts, Sun of Consciousness - Édouard Glissant, pre-painting prep

Bloodmouth - in your arms, 2026 Oil, thuja (arbor vitae), Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus), wax, resin on canvas, mounted on custom aluminium stretcher bars 50 x 35 cm x 2cm

Inhaler, 2026 Oil, pine needles, wax, resin on canvas, mounted on custom aluminium stretcher bars 50 x 35 cm x 2cm

peony petals, firethorn berry, damask rose