Isa Dahl – Info

Isa Dahl was born in Ravensburg in 1965.

Today the artist lives and works in Stuttgart. In 1984 she commenced her studies at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. In 1989 she transferred to the Düsseldorf Academy of Art to study under Professor Dieter Krieg, where she completed her degree as a master class student. One year later, the Academy of Art facilitated a scholarship for her to travel to the USA. Dahl has won a large number of awards, among others the first “Neue Malerei” prize of the savings bank Kreissparkasse Esslingen-Nürtingen for modern painting, in the year 1992 and the spon-sorship award of the 11th German national competition for art students “Kunststudenten stellen aus” in 1993. In 1997 she was commended with the first sponsorship award “Oberschwäbischer Kunstpreis”, i.e. the art prize of Upper Swabia, and in 1999 with the sponsorship award of the artists’ association of Baden Württemberg. Furthermore, she was awarded the Villa Romana Prize, which included a one-year stay at Villa Romana in Florence and the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship. Additional scholarships and stays abroad followed. Since 2005 she has co-operated with the art-ceramics pottery studio “Staatliche Majolika Manufaktur” in Karlsruhe.

 

Isa Dahl has also created several works for public spaces, among other things for the foyer of the civic centre of the Town of Ditzingen in 2000, for the new building of the Medical Clinic of Heidelberg in 2003, an exterior work for the building of the Institute for Pulsed Power and Microwave Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2012, a work for the foyer of the prayer room of the hospital Klinikum Schillerhöhe in Stuttgart in 2014 and a work for the i 2 i – room at Ratiopharm in Ulm in the year 2015.

 

The work of Isa Dahl is characterised by brush strokes that spiral over and under each other, with several colour layers rendered with the aid of a glazing technique, thus creating interlacing patterns. Thanks to precise planning and dynamic application of colour, this representational but also abstract painting style infuses imaginary pictorial spaces with incredible depth and intensive luminosity. For her works, Dahl uses mixed paints derived from the palette of primary colours such as red and yellow as well as secondary colours like orange and green. She combines oil paints into new paint mixtures either on the palette or right on the canvas itself. Thus, Dahl does not use any pure chromatic pigments. The colour gradations generate an infinite pictorial space, revealing innumerable layers to the viewer – limitations are seemingly non-existent. The artist’s own environment serves as her inspiration for highly complex images that are reminiscent of biomorphic shapes. To that end she initially captures scenes in the form of rough sketches and then undertakes the painterly artistic process. Dahl strives to paint with great concentration and without any prolonged interruptions. In the process, her tempo also determines the tempo of pictorial evolution until the picture has attained a state of autonomy.