Venus 13 is a series of 13 plaster wall sculptures with paintings of egg tempera.

After the long, first lockdown period in the spring of 2020, I traveled through the Pyrenees for a few weeks in the summer. It was on a sweltering day that I happened to be driving past Montignac and had the chance to visit the Lascaux caves there. I was enchanted by the cave drawings and the way in which they merge with the walls and ceilings of the halls. As an artist I felt a kinship with the previously living people, who had drawn on the stone vaults there. I was blown away by the way they used the hollows in the rocks to represent the bulges of the images. The belly of a drawn prehistoric horse becomes convex and spatial due to a cavity in the underground. Back in my studio I made mounds of clay and covered them with a plaster layer, then I took the clay out of the plaster shell, leaving cup-shaped plaster bowles. I made a group of 13 plaster shapes, all of which were created according to this principle of inversion. Holes became bulges, bulges became cavities and vice versa. On these plaster dishes I painted new shapes with egg tempera and pigment powder, which sometimes go along with the shape and sometimes against the three-dimensional shape. In the series forms and anti-forms arise within the frame of the shell-shaped dishes. The title of the series is Venus 13 after the painting The birth of Venus by Boticelli, which depicts the birth of Venus from the sea. I.B.

egg tempera, plaster