Artwork

With red fabric panels, stretched in the window arches of the ecclesiastical cloister of the collegiate church of Kyllburg, Marie Senftleben-Gudrich creates an intentional contrast in her work ‘Nature — Culture’.
The historical space enters into a silent dialogue with the signal-strong, red color of the cloth, which emphasizes the interstices of the masonry and makes them visible as empty spaces.
In her second work ‘Nature — Culture’ the color red also appears as a central element, this time as a filler of an aging wall at the edge of the path. And again, the material allows the spaces in the structure, as a symbol of change, to become recognizable.
In both works, Marie Senftleben-Gudrich poses the question of the past and the present, of what once was and what remains today. In her aesthetic intervention she makes spatial and temporal boundaries tangible and at the same time thematizes their dissolution in the course of time. The red color of the cloth, like a lifeline, permeates the old walls and gives them a new vitality. Senftleben-Gudrich’s works thus serve not only to make the old visible, but also to give it a new meaning. In this way, the artist also encourages reflection on her own interaction with nature and cultural history.

Artist

Her life path led Marie Senftleben-Gudrich via an initial training as a goldsmith, art studies in Sweden and England and many further stays abroad also to psychotherapy. Today, she combines her background as a family and systemic therapist with her passion for ceramics and art. Since 2017, as the first chairwoman and managing director of again speicher e.V., she has been one of the driving forces behind the young cultural association in the Verbandsgemeinde Speicher.

Marie Senftleben-Gudrich is fascinated by the essence of things, their history and the aesthetic appeal of the material. In her works she often processes found and collected things in experimental combinations of materials. By means of the unusual staging of structures and forms, she gives existing things new contexts and levels of meaning. The relationship between nature and culture is one of the central themes of her artistic work.
In dealing with aspects of change and transience, she poses the question of the conscious use of resources and our cultural history.