Zuzanna Skiba
Zuzanna Zita Skiba (born 1968 in Koszalin, Poland) is a German artist. Her artistic media are primarily drawing and painting, but also photography, performance and video. She developed her own exhibition series as a curator under the theme Das verorte Verlangen_Kunst & Kartographie, as well as Hidden & Bad, Collier, tasty painting and Salon Philadelphia. Skiba is a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berufsverband Bildender Künstler*innen Berlin and the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen. She lives and works in Berlin. Life Zuzanna Skiba was born in Koszalin in Poland in 1968 as the daughter of German Ukrainians. The family moved to Germany in 1977 and settled in Bielefeld. In 1988 Zuzanna Skiba completed her training as a cartographer in the map department of the City of Bielefeld and at City Hall and State Survey for Aerial Photography in Bad Godesberg. The focus of her training was topographic and thematic cartography, as well as terrain cartography and hachure. There she met her mentor, the painter and cartographer Werner Drimecker (1928 - 2011). From 1990 to 1995 Zuzanna Skiba studied painting under Inge Dörries-Höher and free drawing under Karl-Heinz Meyer at the FH Design in Bielefeld. She received her diploma in painting from Inge Höher on the subject of colour flow as irritation, the abandoned perspective (Farbfluß als Irritation, die aufgegebene Perspektive). She then did post-graduate studies on painting at the Academie Minerva in Groningen (Netherlands) under Johan van Oord and Jaap Berghuis. 1997-1998 she was a guest student at the Berlin University of the Arts on philosophy under Robert Kudelka on Kant's Critique of Judgement, as well as a postgraduate student in on Art in Context (Kunst im Kontext) from 2013 to 2014. Work In her artistic work Zuzanna Skiba deals with the theme of magnetic fields, which she visualises as subjective cartography in her paintings and drawings. Terrain hachure, a cartographic drawing key, is her central means of representation. In cartography, hachure is used to depict the topographical nature of a landscape. Short lines are placed next to each other, following alternating directions and with variable density and length, in order to visualise landscape elevations in the two-dimensional top view of a map. Zuzanna Skiba conceptually transfers the terrain hachure to natural and emotional energies, which appear on canvas or paper in amorphous, seemingly flowing and formations. The dotted structures seem to obtain their shape through magnetic influence and to change fluidly. The origin of these magnetic fields are inner "landscapes" that are brought into the picture. Thus, the artistic process is a mental cartography that, in a state of continuous change, on the one hand feeds subjectively from the artist's memories and experiences, but on the other hand also refers to external contexts. Work cycles Drawn Zuzanna Skiba's concept is particularly clear in the work cycle Drawn. In case of the pencil drawing, she works exclusively with the cartographic hachure of the terrain. Immersed in the process of her work, she places hachure line upon hachure line and creates a