Artists

Marie Aly, Florian Nöthe

Press release

The exhibition Korral brings together two artistic positions that, at first glance, could hardly be more different: the enigmatic visual worlds of Marie Aly and the conceptual object stagings of Florian Nöthe. Upon closer inspection, however, surprising resonances between the two approaches emerge—here presented together for the first time in a shared exhibition context.

Marie Aly (*1980, Berlin), who initially studied illustration at HAW Hamburg before completing her master class studies under Ralf Kerbach at the HfBK Dresden, has developed a multifaceted artistic practice encompassing oil paintings, etchings, and wall paintings. Aly’s protagonists possess a vivid, unmistakable radiance—achieved through a luminous color palette marked by intense greens and blues, as well as fluorescent accents. In works such as Me and You or Only Lover Left Alive, her subtly androgynous figures transcend rigid categories, blurring the boundaries between genders as well as between human and animal. These are beings with a singular presence—elusive, yet deeply affecting.

Florian Nöthe (*1995, Munich) studied art education under Tanja Widmann and sculpture under Florian Pumhösl at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Korral presents several of his Compound works: birdcages—some dismantled into their component parts—encased in glass. An object originally conceived as an instrument of confinement becomes, in this context, confined itself—isolated from its everyday or original setting and translated into a new sphere of meaning. This shift draws attention to the material structures of control and containment. The birdcage—symbol of the domination of nature within a dichotomous nature-culture paradigm—is transformed into an exhibition object that interrogates the cultural mechanisms through which we categorize our environment.
In this juxtaposition, the title Korral unfolds its full significance: it refers to enclosure and convergence, but also to the tension between containment and display. In the interplay between Aly’s animistic portrayals and Nöthe’s recontextualization of the objet trouvé, our ambivalent relationship to our surroundings—between idealization and control, appropriation and detachment—becomes visible and open to discussion.

Text: Dina Kagan (2025)