Summer Festival

15 September 2022

Summer Festival at Cadoro

The Summer Festival 2022 at the Cadoro - Centre for Art and Science in Mainz was a great success. At the invitation of Dr Dorothea van der Koelen, visitors were able to meet the artists Lore Bert, Sebastian Dannenberg and Mohammed Kazem in person and also ask their own questions about their art. For those who were unfortunately unable to attend our festival, we have made a compilation of all the day’s events.

We start with Cristiana Coletti’s artist talk with Lore Bert. There is much to discover in the work of the Mainz paper artist. The art and culture journalist Cristiana Coletti will take visitors into the world of Lore Bert’s sacred buildings. Inspired by the numerous places of worship of all kinds of religions she encountered over the years, the artist created works inspired by architectural drawings.

Coletti leads the viewer through the genesis of the group of works, from the precursor works Im Zeichen der Metrie (In the Sign of the Metric) to the first journeys to the Orient and the visits to mosques that fired the imagination of the industrious cosmopolitan to the canals of Venice, where the artist from Mainz found a second home at the turn of the millennium.

Afterwards, the Bremen painter and sculptor Sebastian Dannenberg met with Dr Dorothea van der Koelen on the 1st floor of the Cadoro for an artist’s talk. Starting from industrial materials – steel, aluminium, concrete – Dannenberg creates artistic creations of tremendous poetic beauty. Through the painterly ductus of his paint application, he sets a counterpoint to the minimalist forms of the readymades that form his painting ground.

Humorous allusions of forms and titles prove how Dannenberg subtly and winkingly grants space to contemporary events. At the same time, his works are immensely stimulating and allusive. They do not succumb to the temptation to give simple answers to simple questions. The artist, who had exciting answers elicited from him by the gallerist and the visitors, thinks the same way. Afterwards, his new exhibition entitled Resonance was ceremoniously opened with a speech by the Mainz journalist Marianne Hoffmann.

The final event was the exhibition opening of Mohammed Kazem’s Corona Scratches in the bazaar area of the exhibition house. The Corona period with all its restrictions was not without influence on the artist’s work. He processed his experiences in several series of Corona Scratches. In them, he combines the scratch technique, which he has been refining since the 1990s, with circular forms that have been burned into his mind from the media representations of the virus. Within these series, Mohammed Kazem unfolds a great richness of colours and shapes, which are partly due to varying scratch techniques and partly to the controlled use of chance.

The artist himself was present at the summer festival and answered the interested questions of Dr. Dorothea van der Koelen in an artist talk.