Media

The Berlin-based painter, draughtswoman, and object artist Romy Campe is known in the art world simply as ROMY. Within figurative painting – especially portraiture and the human image – she occupies a distinctive position. Her work is inspired by the traditional layering techniques of great portrait masters like Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, or Caravaggio. Her oil paintings, created through countless finely glazed layers, radiate an aura of old mastery.

Her central subject is the human being. ROMY’s art explores themes such as figuration and corporeality. In this exhibition, “PURE ROMY”, she presents portraits of women, men, and children – mostly as solo figures – that are at times sensual and intimate, at times androgynous, ambiguous, and shrouded in mystery.

The exhibition shows how ROMY has expanded her artistic practice through experimentation and digital engagement. She often integrates fantastical, surreal, or symbolist elements into her figurations.

Her figures seem to assume a fictional identity and physical presence, as if they were stepping out of the canvas and into space. Hybrids, mythic beings, symbioses, and metamorphoses are central to her visual language. Across her paintings, drawings, collage works, objects, and installations, she draws from worlds of myth, fairy tale, and dream.

Many of her current works evoke a sense of being in between – a zone where time dissolves, and distinctions between past, present, and future blur. This also applies to recurring sculptural motifs like the cocoon or the nest, which revolve around connection, emergence, and release.

Another key element of the exhibition is the ROMS – mixed-media painting collages in which digital editing introduces movement that becomes visible through a tablet or smartphone.

The human being plays the central role in Romy Campe’s work. The artist’s portraits reflect human traits – inner states, moods and frames of mind. Even though her motifs also bear features of the fantastic and the surreal, all of this points to the early modern tradition of the psychological image of the human being. Some motifs thus call to mind great painting traditions (Caravaggio, Frans Hals, Rembrandt).

The artist’s grisaille oil technique is likewise rooted in Old Master methods. In the course of painting she lays up to forty layers of glaze one over another. That ROMY blends surreal and fantastic dimensions into this Old Master idiom, however, lends her compositions a particularly idiosyncratic and individual note.

What she paints are imagined worlds on the border between reality and dream, between faithful likeness and whimsical creation. A particular expression of the eyes, along with the bearing and gestures of the people she portrays, points to inner states. Such motifs reflect feelings about life and emotions – longing, expectation, hope or confidence, but also fear, anger or despair.

The artist often develops her motifs from her own self-image. Alongside depictions of modern, mostly young women from everyday life, her œuvre is populated by fantastic figures, hybrid and fabulous creatures and mythological beings. Symbioses and transformations are omnipresent.

A dominant aspect of many of ROMY’s works is the background, often kept in muted colors and mostly deep and dark, against which her figures act. It is connected with the effect of sfumato (the blurred or indeterminate). This stylizing or fading out of any tangible space underlines the impression of an imagined, fantastic in-between zone in which it is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and dream, nor between today, yesterday and tomorrow.

“My paintings depict visions of human existence and encompass realms of imagination, desire, dreaming, and escape from the present,” ROMY once explained in an interview. Despite the dreamlike ambiguity in which the artist “embeds” many of her motifs, her paintings also evoke associations with our modern present and the unsettling experiences that come with it.

Themes such as melancholy or the search for one’s own identity are therefore as present in the artist’s motifs as a spirit of resistance. In ROMY’s paintings the ram becomes a mythical symbol. With its curved horns, its strength and its courage, it stands for assertiveness and for resistance against everything that presses in on it.

Collages hold a special place in the artist’s œuvre. On the one hand, these are works in which ROMY combines painting with photography. On the other, they are motifs that grow out of the symbiosis of painting and photography and out of an experimental working process on the computer (based, for example, on photographic self-portraits of the artist). ROMY calls the results of this process “morphings”.

In these morphings, chance is given ample room; here the artist also goes a step beyond herself, for example by “destroying” her own photographic self-portrait. In their hybridity these images seem enigmatic or disturbing on the one hand; on the other, they unsettle the images of beautiful poses that constantly surround us in advertising and the mass media, and expose them as manipulation and deception.

The image of the human being has become more questionable and unpredictable than ever. This motif is a common thread running through ROMY’s work. For the fairy-tale and the fanciful, the grotesque and the bizarre contrast subtly with the ambiguous, the unfathomable and the uncanny.