Nicolas Fehr is Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff-Stipendiat

Nicolas Fehr, a master student with Professor Raphael Sbrzesny has been chosen by a jury as one of six artists for a 2022 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Fellowship.

The fellows receive a monthly stipend of 1.200 EUR for two years and may participate in educational events of the Studienstiftung – such as conferences relating to their art, excursions or summer academies. A group exhibit will be organised for them at the Düsseldorfer Kunsthalle in the fall of 2023. The grant also includes the production of a catalogue at the end of the fellowship. After the conclusion of the fellowship honorees have the opportunity to join the Studienstiftung.

Starting in 2016, honorees have created limited editions to produce returns that have been reinvested into the fellowship program and thereby support future fellows.

In June 2022 the current jury invited 14 finalists from 70 entries to present their work for a final decision round in September at the Brücke-Museum Berlin. Some 400 guest came to see the work following the meeting of the jury there on September 3 and 4 to see the open presentation of the entries. The exhibit can be viewed till October 3. Admission is free.

The honorary jury for the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Fellowship changes annually. In 2022 members were: John Bock, Johanna Diehl, Antje Engelmann, Gregor Gleiwitz, Franka Hörnschemeyer, Christian Jankowski, Annette Kelm, Wolfgang Mayer (Discoteca Flaming Star), Bjørn Melhus, Christine Streuli and Nasan Tur.

The Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Fellowship awards post-graduates for their exceptional artistic achievements. As a rule, every other year the program awards to three to five artists who are exclusively or mostly self-employed. The fellowship runs over one year at first, but can be extended for another year.

Candidates for the fellowship need to get recommended by art academies with governmental recognition; former recipients of a Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Fellowship, as well as a changing group of artists that have been invited for that purpose. The Fellowship was established in 1975 by the artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff who entrusted his private fortune to the grant giving program under his name. From the very start the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Fellowship has cooperated with the Studienstiftung that has assumed responsibility for conceptualising and running the program.

Nicolas Fehr (*1989 in Frankfurt am Main) was raised in Connecticut, USA, and returned to Germany as a Teenager. He studied media arts and scenography with Omer Fast and Jonathan Beppler at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and then went on to study liberal arts as a master student of Raphael Sbrzesny at the HfK Bremen.

Fehr works at the interface of experimental pop music, performance, visual arts and installations. Recurrent themes in his work include perception and memory, love and lust, life and death, imagination and mysticism.

He oftentimes develops alter egos and narratives that he then realises in performances and installations. In the trans-medial piece “Movements That Are Hard To Replicate” he showed at the Master Student Exhibit 2021/22 at the Weserburg, Fehr wove together paranormal activities, time travels, fairies, manliness, trap- and folk music in a performative installation. He foregrounds questions regarding his personal biography and yearnings after other, fluid ways of life beyond unambiguous attributions of gender, background and sexual identity. Fehr is also active as a composer and performer in dance and theatre (Volksbühne Berlin, Schauspielhaus Wien, Ballet National de Marseille, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi), as well as in a number of musical projects (Lea Porcelain, Jungstötter, Ilgen-Nur, Finn Ronsdorf) and as a singer and multi-instrumentalist with the avant-pop-band Ooi.