Artists

Philip Emde, Stefan Marx

Press release

Philip Emde (1976, DE) and Stefan Marx (1979, DE) present _5 Jahre Arbeit_ with Ruttkowski;68 in Düsseldorf. The exhibition is a culmination of five years of collaborative summer painting sessions of the artists and longterm friends at Emde’s studio in Neustadt (DE). It began five years ago as a shared experimentation on a large, vintage hand screen-printing table and evolved to an ongoing exploration of process and form. Together with their friend, expert and technical advisor Björn Wiede on their side, they delved into the possibilities of this technique. The resulting works are a series of monotypes on canvas, characterized by a painterly aesthetic and a reduced color palette of black, white, and red. Using various rounded “joysticks“ Emde and Marx work their motif through the paint-coated screen, achieving differing line qualities and thicknesses. This technique allows for both to emerge a positive and negative work of the same motif. These motifs range from Stefan Marx’s distinctive handwritten words and phrases to imagery drawn from Philip Emde’s Emdiland – his studio, a playful cosmos inhabited by Steiff animals. They also include elements that reflect the artist’s shared environment and experience—such as bats of the COVID-19 pandemic or ice cream sundaes inspired from a local ice cream parlor in Neustadt. _5 Jahre Arbeit_ exclusively shows works created during these annual summer painting sessions. The word _Harmony_ is written all around a work by Stefan Marx —a fitting reflection of their shared dialogue, work rhythm and joy that defines this progressing work and artistic friendship.