The decelerator

In unserer Rubrik „Was macht eigentlich…?“ erzählen Hochschulangehörige von und über ihre Arbeit.

Woodcarving artist Gabriela Jolowicz, born in 1978 in Salzgitter, studied illustration at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig under Volker Pfüller and Thomas M. Müller. She graduated there in 2010 as a master student. 

Hello Gabriela, what are you actually up to at the HfK Bremen?

Since 2019 I have been leading one relief printing course here a semester. We work with wood and linocut in the manual printing workshop. These are interdisciplinary offers for students in our faculties of Digital Media, Integrated Design and Fine Arts. The students come with highly different sets of knowledge and experiences. Some have never dabbled in these techniques before, others already have acquired deep experience with it.

Are there basic and advanced courses?

No, only one course for everyone. At the beginning, the students learn the basics of carving on test boards. Those who are already versed in the craft start working on their content straight away.

You live in Berlin, what motivated you to work 400 kilometres from there to here?

I knew Katrin von Maltzahn as a professor at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts (HGB), where I studied. And I also knew Jens Schubert, who taught the course in Bremen from 2016 to 2019. Two people that I hold in high regard. Then I was asked if I wanted to take over the course and it appeared to me that if the two of them work at the HfK, or have worked there, then it must be good there – and so I accepted the offer.

What keeps you here?

The absolute freedom, I can choose projects that I find exciting myself and it's a lot of fun to bring people together who would otherwise sit at a computer or paint big pictures or design everyday objects. It's like a melting pot, it always creates a great atmosphere.

Why do students come to the course? In our digitalised era, woodcarving is seen as an almost archaic art without barely any hints of coolness. Or does the craft now seem cool because it appears to be a step back to the future due to being 100 percent analogue?

The contemporary appeal lies in the fact that woodcarving means slowing down – in a time when you scroll through 200 pictures on Instagram in two minutes and are totally overstimulated. Working with Photoshop, drawing something on an iPad, can be done in a flash. But woodcutting is always slow. You just have to think carefully about what you are doing ...

... because there is no escape hatch by just pressing Ctrl Z to undo something.

That's why you think carefully about how you work. The process of cutting into wood takes time, peace of mind and focus. For many people, this is like entering a new world after pressing a pause button in their everyday lives. You learn how to design pictures and often come to different results than with digital tools.

Do students discover that you are withdrawing from the digital world or is that exactly why they come? 

Many students in Digital Media come in any case because they no longer want to sit at the computer. They yearn to at last create with their hands, mess around with paint again.

On the other hand, woodcarving is a medium of artistic expression that made art reproducible long before the age of technical reproducibility.

Yes, I can copy the pictures, print them again and again. I could therefore put the same works on display in three exhibitions. Which is also appealing. A painting is always unique, if I want a second one, I have to paint it again.

How many students attend your course?

Between 10 and 20 in each case, but usually twice or three times as many want to take advantage of the offer and participate.

What motivated you to cut wood?

I started with etchings as a guest student at the HBK in Braunschweig, then made my first screen prints at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim and finally went to the woodcut workshop at the HGB Leipzig. I was allowed to do what I wanted. That resulted in a small series and Prof. Volker Pfüller said: “You can keep doing that.” Despite my love/hate relationship, that encouraged me to continue working in this difficult medium.

What is the fascination?

Carving pictures out of wood – you can create the illusion of spaces and three-dimensional depth in a two-dimensional surface. That captivated me. My diploma thesis were woodcuts of party scenes, people in a toy store...

... and here we come to your concept: to say something about the present by using a 500-year-old and indeed the very first reproduction technique and the first mass communication medium ever.

Yes, I find the discrepancy between the content and the technique of the pictures exciting. I always drew a lot. Yet I never had the feeling that a picture was really finished. I always wanted and could keep working on it. With my woodcuts, I first had the impression that a picture can really be finished so that I am happy with it. I start cutting, do the proof, pause, change this or that here and there and then eventually reach a point of satisfaction.

Do you still make mistakes?

I used to not draw in advance, sometimes even worked with a blunt knife or a scalpel. And I kept cutting something away and then was really annoyed about it so I had to start again. But today I draw in advance, even though I don't like to commit myself in advance and find routine work quite awful. Playing it safe is super boring. On the other hand, you don't want to mess it up and toss hours of work into the rubbish bin. Fortunately, very few things end up there these days.

In Bremen, the Kunsthalle invited you as a contemporary woodcut artist to participate in their current exhibition (until March 9, 2025) with an intervention on works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), co-founder of the artist community "Die Brücke". The show chronologically traces the eventful panorama of the artist's life using his woodcuts. With these works the expressionist came close to his ideal of a direct and original articulation of the impressions life in big cities made on him. Is Kirchner your role model?

I have known him for a long time. My art teacher at high school once showed me work by Kirchner and said he thought it was great, and I was like: "What?" I was shocked. There were farmers' wives with green faces and the mountains were purple. Crazy! But after I had immersed myself in the work, I came around to thinking it was kind of cool.

Woodcutting used to be a reproduction technique that was used discretely. The results sometimes looked as if they were brush or pen drawings. Then came modern artists like Kirchner, who appreciated the obstinate and irregular nature of the material...

... yes, they showed that it was about carving in wood that sprayed debris and splintered. Kirchner didn't draw out lines, but simply plunged the knife into the wood. His work always looked as if it was done quickly and roughly, but he still tells his stories very precisely in his pictures.

What interests you more, the wild expressiveness or the motifs in Kirchner's oeuvre, these desires, fears, longings, etc. rumbling beneath the surface of an existential loneliness?

Both. Usually something has happened in my life or I have observed something and then I think: I have found my motif. Then I usually put other stories into the scene that happen simultaneously. This approach creates collages of several observations. For instance, in one of my pictures you can see a laptop in the foreground that was on my desk in Leipzig. Behind it are mountains that I saw in Barcelona, ​​so the pictures become a kind of kaleidoscope ...

... of your experience of reality. And just like Kirchner, you show people and scenes that you know.

Yes, the pictures reflect what is happening in my life.

You only ever print in black, while Kirchner printed in colour. Have you ever ventured into that?

Not seriously. I already tell so much on this one board, I don't need any more colour. I like this kind of reduction to basics that is reminiscent of early leaflets and newspaper graphics. But I am carving more and more structures into it. These lines and details then don't come out in a deep, inky black in print, but in shades of grey. Therefor a lot happens between black and white. I always want to exploit these possibilities to the maximum ...

Your pictures are exuberantly detailed and impressively finely worked out, ideal for this black-grey-white melange. But you don't take the step in the other direction, towards abstraction, which Kirchner did?

No, I just love telling about everyday life too much.

Graphic novel is one association evoked by your work. Do you think of your pictures in series and flirt with the comic genre?

No. But for exhibitions I do think about what is a captivating sequence for hanging the pictures, for which I then also have a story in mind. You can then walk along the line of pictures on the wall and read them like a comic book.

For the works in the Kunsthalle you also dressed up figures from Kirchner's woodcuts in modern costumes and transferred them to contemporary settings, while retaining the striking, large-format scale.

Yes, I took portraits of Kirchner and re-cut them 1:1. It was exciting to imitate the way Kirchner worked in purely technical terms and to see how dynamic the pieces were.

But you did not adapt and bow to his style.

No. Kirchner's portraits are the strange element in my pictures.

It then becomes a fascinating contrast as you put Kirchner´s “Self-Portrait 1905/06”, in a fast food restaurant with a cup of Coke and a burger or stroll along Potsdamer Straße in today's Berlin with his “Girls from Fehmarn" from 1913. What results from your dialogue with Kirchner?

Teaming up with the curator Annett Reckert and my colleague Thomas Kilpper, I got upset about Kirchner, how he is always so condescending towards his wife in his diaries, not at all nice, and that he wrote reviews about himself under an alias because he thought nobody understood him. He was really praising himself – embarrassing. He really wasn't a good guy. Artistically, though, I think he's really great. That just happens a lot. For example, you think a band is really cool and then the singer says something racist and you think, shit, can I still listen to this, can I still bear this? I'm just thinking of The Smiths, whose singer Morrissey is talking nasty patriotic crap today. That's so sad.

You have to decide whether to separate art from the artist's personality.

It is not that bad with Kirchner. But I stopped listening to Rammstein after these accusations of abuses of power and sexual assaults.

But one may look at Kirchner's pictures even though he had traits of narcissism and machoism?

Yes, he had gone through really tough times. A year before he killed himself, the Nazis confiscated dozens of his pictures and destroyed some of them. That was a stab in the heart, it must have destroyed something in him. So you can understand why Kirchner wasn't so likeable. But that does not excuse anything.

Did you have the impression that you had to contradict your famous colleague, improve him, round out his work?

My analysis wasn't that critical. I'm rather looking for parallels to today. When I take over Kirchner's images of the costume/stage designer Dorothea Sternheim, his student Nele van de Velde and the writer's daughter Donata Hardt, for example, I think less about what Kirchner wanted to express, but more about the biographies of the women who were irretrievably thrown off course by the Nazis. In my pictures I transport the women to Berlin today. They could study art there at the UdK (Berlin University of the Arts), have a cool time, but at the same time there are still Nazis, an increasingly strong AfD and war, now in Ukraine, in Israel ... the problems are still around – just in a different form.

How did your HfK course come to collaborate with the Kunsthalle?

The curator knew that I also teach here in Bremen, so she came by and liked the spontaneous, authentic work of the students.

Where can one seen them?

Starting on January 24, 2025, we can expand the Kirchner exhibition in the new study room of the Kupferstichkabinett with work titled "Intersection".

Was there any guidance?

Not from the Kunsthalle. But I set a theme. Kirchner was never in Bremen, so the students should imagine if he were to visit Bremen today. Whom would he have met, where would he have gone? The students captured the atmosphere in the neighbourhood pubs that they like to frequent and they depicted everyday situations in the cityscape, for example in the harbour, and created very different works. In the background there was always a very intensive study of Kirchner and the art of woodcutting, whereby we also did a lot of research in digital archives such as the MoMA (New York) or Städl (Frankfurt/Main) and looked through topical books that I had brought in.

And what was the topic on Kirchner in the second semester?

One of Kirchner's patrons, Gustav Schiefler, published books with all of his graphics, but not the pictures, but descriptions of the pictures, which are very reduced and totally charming. For example, it only says: “A group of four people sitting around a table in a café. In the corner of the room, which forms the background, a chimney protrudes at right angles.” Or: “In the foreground on the footpath two women meet. A man lies on the other side of a flowerbed in a park, behind it are bushes.” Somehow in concrete details and then again not. Wonderfully right in between. The students made woodcuts to match the descriptions, usually without knowing the original.

Were the students able to respond to the literary visualisation strategy of the past with their own visual language from today?

They tried things out, then looked at what they liked, talked about it, and continued to experiment. Each one for themselves, but also in reflection on what Kirchner had done and what their fellow students were doing. This is how students searched for and found their own handwriting, their own artistic style.

So you didn't first adapt Kirchner's style and composition principles and then emancipate yourself from them?

No. The students look at Kirchner and immediately have their own ideas, which is also important because we don't have much time in the courses, it's all about getting started, everyone is making, printing, exploring the use of colours and the different knives. We always all work together in the workshop, there is no home office.

Did students from the Fine Arts, Integrated Design and Digital Media arrive with different approaches from each other?

Nope. I can't say from the results who is studying what. What is different is the speed of artistic production. Some students produce one picture a day, others need the entire course for one picture.

How many students submitted woodcuts to be exhibited in the art gallery?

About 20. The exhibition curator and I made a selection of their work. Quality is always a stupid word, but the pictures must have a justification to get placed in the Kunsthalle Bremen. It has to be evident that we are not in a high school art course, but at the HfK. And that means that you see works in graphic art where students have dealt very closely with the content and developed their own formal language.

What did the students get out of the course, apart from getting to know Kirchner and techniques in woodcutting?

Those are two important results. They deal with surface and colour in a completely different aesthetic than when you paint with brushes or draw with pencils. And they learned that this art medium is not costly. You do not even need 100 euros for wood, paints, knives or cutters to set up a studio at home.

Will there be a follow-up project?

Yes, we are currently producing a children's booklet to go along with the Kirchner show, that includes games and white pages to colour in. We have also selected some works from the exhibition and depicted details for a kind of scavenger hunt through the spaces of the Kunsthalle. For example, Kirchner's "Fox Terrier on the Club Chair" (1905): a student carved a chair with a cushion on it and a dog in front of it. Next to this picture is the question: "Can you find a similar picture in the exhibition?" We also explain what woodcarving is in very simple texts and pictures.

Dear Gabriela, thank you for the conversation.