Annabell Häfner

In poetic dreamscapes, artist Annabell Häfner (*1993) explores the relationship between anthropogenic infrastructure and nature. Annabell Häfner's “non-places”—a concept coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé—serve her as metaphors for a multi-option society driven by efficiency and speed. Guided by an overarching interest in how transience can be captured in painting, the artist creates fictional, hyper-surreal, and highly sensitive spatial structures that are potentiated in their atmospheric expression and seem to epitomize collective experiences of ephemerality and longing. Iterations of spatial motifs and architectural settings between the figurative and the gestural allow the foreground and background of the image to melt into one sensual entity. With glazed paint application and opaque overpainting with chalk, the works oscillate between definition, omission, and allusion, appearing in part sketch-like, in part sharply contoured. One of her sources of inspiration—Japanese woodblock prints and paintings of the ukiyo-e, which date back to 17th-century Japan—is present in color schemes and compositional elements, as well as subjects that seem to be borrowed from ukiyo-e, and more specifically from the subgenre fūkei-ga.

Annabell Häfner (*1993 in Bonn) studied from 2014-2020 at the Art Academy Weissensee, Berlin in the class of Werner Liebmann. From 2020-2021 she was a master student of Prof. Nader Ahriman. She was the winner of the Mart Stam Prize 2020 and received the Inside Art Fellowship 2020. Her works have been shown in the Rundgang 50Hertz at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, among others, and are already in renowned private collections, especially in Germany and the USA.