"Culture helps to create a diverse, inclusive and enriching society based on respect, understanding and cooperation," says the COUNCIL for ART and DESIGN, which aims to help keep city centers, in this case especially those of Würzburg, vibrant with cultural offerings from the fields of art and design.
For this purpose, three locations will be set up during the Würzburg city festival. As pop up stores in the middle of the city in Würzburg market place 26 to meet, talk and experience art. Artists and fashion designers are gathered there to give an insight into their creations.
We accompanied the event for three days and talked to the artists and learned many interesting things about their work and motivation.
Art and Textile Design is located in a very fitting place, Würzburg's old Town Hall, in the Behr Hall, where old architecture meets contemporary art.
Kunsthaus Michel celebrates its 45th anniversary on September 22, 2023, whose motto is meet . talk . experience art.
It is a permanent address for culture and crafts. Changing exhibitions, conservation picture framing, events from all areas of culture, workshops for children and adults comprise the program.
The courtyard - the ARTRIUM - creates a unique atmosphere of encounter on its cultural evenings, cheerful, approachable and of high interest in art, design and the performing artists.
As a wardrobe and costume designer at the Stadttheater Fürth, she found her passion a few years ago in focusing on the design of high-quality sets using avatars and digitally designed 3D costumes. Through her many years of work at the Stadttheater Fürth, she has been entrusted with numerous in-house productions in the field of plays and musicals.
"It is a matter of the heart to me to advance the highly charged debates about sustainability and resource management in the fashion world and to further expand the possibilities of 3D costume production," says Fröhlich-Buntsel.
The world of art and fashion is changing, I'm learning, and this is leading to new opportunities. The digital transformation process, which began even before 2020, has fundamentally changed the cultural sector and challenges creatives to constantly rethink their work. Kaja Fröhlich-Buntsel is firmly convinced that it is crucial to break new ground and find unconventional solutions in order to keep pace with the challenges of the future.
Sophia Schneider-Esleben turns art into fashion and revives watercolors and drawings by her grandfather. Paul Schneider-Esleben, one of the most prominent architects of the post-war period, provides the motifs for SSE's fabric designs with his watercolors and sketches. SSE also transforms the designs of artist Emil Schult, the "eye of Kraftwerk", into artworks for their label. The aim is to graphically adapt the works in their formal expression to the body.
As a fashion designer and cut director, SSE has mastered the composition of body masses and proportions as well as materials, colors and patterns. Each design is created digitally in different sizes for its effect. The selection of artwork always corresponds to a new mix of moods and color trends, whether large or small scale, straight or disintegrating, light, dark or vibrant.
In her digital sketchbook, she experiments with the proportions of the digitized artworks. This is how she transforms art into fashion. The next step is to digitally create the final repeats, the repeated patterns for the fabric print. Here, the size of the pattern is determined, how brilliant the colors are, and it is decided whether the works need to be graphically adjusted. When all the parameters are right, the files are printed on organic cotton in Germany or on bamboo in Poland. This is done with drinkable organic inks, which are colorfast and lightfast, and without water consumption.
COWBANDs are exceptional leather bracelets, completely new and completely different, unique and original. Wide, decorated cowhide straps nestle around the wrist and become one with the warmth of the skin. The natural material wears smoothly despite its robustness, which makes ladies and gentlemen equally enthusiastic about this product. The upcycling bracelets are designed and handmade in a symbiosis of leather and textile materials by the graduate designer Susanne Dienst-Lang as unique pieces. From vegetable tanned cowhide, combined with treasures from her large material collection and various residual materials from a small German leather manufactory, personal collectibles are created.
The designer developed her own technique for these solitary bands, combining the cowhide with ribbons, cords, lace and an abundance of beads that serve as fasteners for the COWBANDs. Each individual model in the four series gets a logo horn button, is numbered, signed and packaged in a fabric bag. Matching key chains have recently become available. They are timeless and adapt to the personal style of the owners. Thus, they decorate the evening dress provided with lace or let the urban cowboy appear authentic with leather applications.
The designer and founder is a city kid, passionate skier and software engineer.
While traveling in the mountains, she discovered something crucial for her during a special event - Alpine pasture drive.
She sees the shepherds and dairymaids moving into the valley, wrapped in an extraordinary fabric. For centuries, "Loden" has protected shepherds, mountaineers and hunters from cold, wind and water. It is a natural, high quality fabric that keeps its shape and fits perfectly in any situation.
It is a material that keeps style. It is water repellent, temperature compensating and windproof. But so far it is used only for traditional costume. Never before has Loden been used in contemporary fashion.
The fashion label „ALPIN LODGE" is born.
During the development of the first collection, it becomes clear how suitable the combination of loden and leather is to create casually elegant and timeless clothing. Since then, this has been the basis of the "ALPIN LODGE" collection, from which all designs are born.
Passion Foods GmbH is a young enterprise founded by two passionate coffee drinkers who have made it their mission to put an end to the aluminum and plastic waste of the capsule industry.
That's Vitaboni: delicious organic and fair trade coffee in a home-compostable, certified capsule from a carbon-neutral company.
"I'm an architect, I take photographs, I sew and I make textile art," Anke Frese-Brammer tells us. "I'm always on the go with my eyes open, with the camera, capturing the moment and the detail." Motifs from architecture, nature, technology and art have done it to her, whether real or reflected abstractly. With her photo motifs, partly real or also graphically reworked or alienated, partly in connection with her drawings - she creates fabrics, which she has printed and sews skirts, dresses and tops, bags, roll bags from them.
Furthermore, she also creates paper and fabric collages: reduced to sections of the photos, structures are shown or the focus is directed to the aesthetics of a particular detail. In this way, sometimes idiosyncratic compositions of a new surreal world are created. My clothes and wonder boxes tell stories: of abandoned houses, construction gaps after demolition, morbid technology, roofs, chimneys, power lines, birds, sheep, fish, clouds and much more.
Mariella Gaensewig is a freelance artist who lives and works in Halle. In her artistic works she takes up topics such as ecological effects of globalization on our environment and way of life. At the same time, she tries to show an alternative solution with my paintings. She succeeds in this through the use of sustainable materials, processing techniques or pictorial examination. Often the solutions shown are not immediately apparent, because they are often found in the choice of materials and their processing techniques.
An exciting aspect is also the individual interpretation that arises when looking intensively at her motifs. Especially when the viewer gets involved in the artist's train of thought from the obvious to the mysterious on the back of her double-sided works.
This was as exciting as it was remarkable during our shooting.
"During my studies at the University of Design in Pforzheim, impressed by the works of my professor, Ben Willikens and the works of Hans Peter Reuter, I became very involved with the process of seeing and comprehending spatial relationships," René Lang explains.
The first question he asked himself in this context when he began his work was: How do we recognize space and distance? How do we recognize our immediate surroundings? Lang's first finding was : light is in relation to shadows, vanishing points and vanishing lines. Everything is related to everything else and the stored knowledge of our experience draws us a spatial idea of our surroundings.
All these were mosaic stones in the development of the theme that moves and drives Lang today: Surfaces in a space prefigured via imaginary vanishing lines, which pretends to have depth, but which, upon a second glance, evoked via irritation and via the shadow images, discovers that the space turns out to be rather flat. Even the surfaces used, i.e. the photographs of corroded, rusted structures, carry minimal spatial depths, which are ultimately also only recognizable through the cast shadows.
"What's important to me is the contrasting of computationally interdependent and corresponding spatial constellations, which transfer their tension to the viewer through their relationships to one another." Lang says.
© 2023
