„Aquaréelles“ combines positions from three different artists in a media-thematic exhibition. The artists work multi-discipline particularly in the field of Painting, Installation, Performance and Video Art. The title shows the collective interest to work contemporary and representational – often by means of watercolour, therefore delicate and glazed applied pigments. Two Video pieces complete the works on paper, an animation made from the singular watercolours from Katia Bourdarel and a performative Video from Quynh Dong. Therewith they expand the concept of watercolor in another media.

Katia Bourdarel’s mystical multimedia works transport one into a fictional world of fairy tales. Skilfully drawn and painted imaginary universes, the subtly arranged motifs suggest prettiness, while the spectators are spirited away into a place where good and evil rub shoulders – a place believed to be long lost but actually very present. Her pictures tell a mysterious story of fantasy and fear, affection and abandonment, constantly oscillating between the apparent poles of good and evil and leaving everything unresolved. Katia Bourdarel is extremely good at interweaving strands of narrative that offer us no closure but several possibilities for further imaginative investigations. They are picture stories – fairy tales – without beginning or end. In this exhibition, Katia Bourdarel presents a new video work consisting of moving watercolours as it were, accompanied by small-scale watercolours on the wall.

In the last few years, Quynh Dong (born 1982 in Vietnam) has been focusing on performance and video, although in her most recent series she has returned to watercolour, the medium she used at the beginning of her artistic career. The starting point of this series is the children’s story of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry written in 1943. In this story, the protagonist believes the rose living on his planet to be the only one in the whole universe, so that when he visits Earth and finds many different roses he is at first very disappointed. For her watercolour series, Dong replaced the rose by a thistle. Just like the rose, a thistle has pricks to defend itself against herbivores. At the same time, the thistle stands for nobility of character and resilience. Quynh Dong carefully selected these flowers due to their specific shape. She plucked them from the soil, stared at them, and eventually started to paint them. Dong watched the thistles blossom and slowly wither. She worked in a flow, constantly repeating the same gesture, while the flowers were changing shape in front of her eyes. It is not the beauty of these flowers she tries to catch in her watercolours, but their passage through time.

Radenko Milak was born in 1980 in former Yugoslavia and currently lives and works in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His works focus on questions of freezing or storing visual data in one’s own individual memory or by means of film and photography. In his watercolours he uses film footage, news reports and press photographs to transform them into small and intimate visual scenarios that can trigger the facts and stories behind these images while turning them into autonomous visual narratives if the political and historical facts are unknown. The contrast between light and dark is at the centre of his works. He uses black water colour which he applies by means of a special flow technique and his very own particular handling of the brush. The large-scale water colours in this exhibition, which thematically refer to the world of film and cinema, have been created especially for this occasion.