Elke Selter

On the work

Has lived in Berlin since 1999. Originally a portrait painter and fashion designer; her large-format oil and acrylic paintings combine several impressions into a single picture.

Painting is my language, my outlet, my contact with the outside world. In the timelessness of the painting process the dimensions shift — towards the world, but also towards the work itself — and out of that grows a meditative love of detail. Long before the first brushstroke meets the bare white paper, a subject has often been fermenting in me for a long time; yet each time it keeps developing, and as if guided by something outside myself it moves my hand. That is how a picture comes about: the pea had been my subject for years … but the fish appeared during the process and completed the image into a coherent, seeming contradiction.