Bumblebee Fur Coat

Exhibition dates: 5 JuLY - 30 July.

Open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 2pm - 5pm & Saturday, Sunday 12pm - 5pm. Free admission.

Peckham based German artists Heike Stommel & The Mssng i’s present “Bumblebee Fur Coat” at Curious Kudu from the 5th – 30th July, 2023. A curation of paintings, googly eyed dice, iron works and blue movies, “Bumblebee Fur Coat” is sews mixing urban seen-it-all together with a mischievous grin. Formal abstractions and iconic portraits are set within a cascade of colour and textures as Heike Stommel’s uncompromising acrylic paintings are counterbalanced and enhanced by The Mssing I’s riotous contributions.

The Mssng i’s are Heike Stommel, Maako and Nora Ludit.

Conceived near Los Angeles on an early summer evening, The Mssng i’s harness the unknowable knowns between two people and an alter ego who are learning about life together after lifetimes lived apart.

The Mssng i’s witness shared times through a collaborative approach where egos are swapped and lovingly returned. Working with iron, paint, crayons, canvas and video, The Mssng i’s exchange media and technique. Their work includes original paintings realised as useful household objects.

The paintings of the artist Heike Stommel are like an expedition into one's own longings and emotions. Viewers discover idiosyncratic abstract figures, faces or compositions that sometimes (want to) elude common aesthetics. In the process, the painter plays with different moods that lend her pictures something mysterious. They are people without faces, empty rooms, or figures that are only defined as an outline by the background. They evoke memories, trigger moods or give rise to questions. The artist's intuitive and spontaneous painting style is reflected in the motif, which stands or hangs freely and securely in space - regardless of what defines it. The painter is concerned with the feeling behind the façade and with approaching this in the pictorial representation.

The painter allows herself the freedom to pick up everything that inspires and interests her, to play through it intuitively and uncontrollably. Each painting is a part of her that she encounters anew herself. Sometimes enigmatic, sometimes provocative, subtle, irritating or mysterious, like an exploratory journey into the interior.

Heike Stommel, born in 1967, explores the boundaries of reality as a painter. Figures emerge, blur and disappear, emerge anew. Each motif - usually the human being - is freely and unconventionally worked out, destroyed and reassembled. In her intuitive painting process, the artist thereby approaches ever closer to the essence behind the essence.

"I don't want to fulfil expectations. I want to give them up to make room for individuality and freedom."

Maako is the chosen name of the artist who believes soundly that the situation is the boss. He loves dice, spray paint and nail varnish. His preference is to work onto cardboard and is fond of the medieval style of flat perspectives and iconography.His dice are one-off pop art tributes to situations and people affecting him. In the everyday world he has been a professional cook .

The artist Nora Ludit lives out her own creativity as Heike Stommel's alter ego. Her artistic expression can be found in any form except painting, which she leaves entirely to Heike. Nora has mainly created pictures sewn from various materials, photographs and drawings, but her works also include video clips and texts. Nora plays with chance, finds here and creates there, lives out femininity in her own way and feels connected to her power plant - Monstera deliciosa (window leaf). Her trademark does not allow herself to be pigeonholed into any category, constantly finding new things to inspire her and try out. Nora "ludits", freely and with ease and joy.

She is already several thousand years old, her biography would fill hundreds of pages. Therefore, it will be omitted at this point. She always lives in the moment where Heike is at. She has had her own Instagram channel for a year now.

Since Nora is not as extremely shy as Heike, she introduces herself here:

“I am Nora and I have just woken up. I have tried to open my eyes, but they are not mine. The one I'm hiding in decided to keep them closed. So, for the time being, I am forced to look at the inside of a stranger's eyelids and wait for them to open to see the world. I am not a prisoner. I have chosen, and choose every day, to wake up in a sleeping one. It gives me the security I need to be able to take in all the space. And the peace it takes to do so. There was only one condition: no painting. So I sewed a walnut and entered. And here I am. Nora. Ready to play.“

IMPRESSIONS