Andrea Damp – Info

Andrea Damp was born in 1977 on the island of Rügen. From 1998 to 2004 she studied Free Art at Berlin University of the Arts under Prof. Hans-Jürgen Diehl, completing her studies as a master class student.

 

Acrylic or oil paints – used in consistencies ranging from watery, almost water colour like thinness to creamy and viscous density – coalesce and overlap. Working on that basis, the artist starts developing new imagery in a targeted manner, but also welcoming fortuitous effects. Her sources of inspiration are commonplace streams of images derived from newspapers, the internet or her personal collection of snapshots. Regardless of the sources of her motifs, what is characteristic of her work is that she invariably empties and isolates the motif she has discovered from all of its origins, interrelationships and semantic content. Andrea Damp’s pictorial figures usually appear to be completely detached – engrossed in their respective activities.

The pictorial motif she has selected is superimposed on an underlying layer consisting of acrylic and oil paint which is poured, spilt, spattered and blended and then moulded using paint and brush until the pictorial layers, structure and design, foreground and background, motif and material have been intricately interwoven by the work process.

Not every brush stroke is precisely calculated, which means that fortuitousness constantly serves as an important means of composition during the pouring, spraying and spilling operations.

By combining the “underpainting” with motifs divorced from their origins, Andrea Damp succeeds in creating entirely new pictorial designs that are preceded by a specific process of deliberation and decision making that shapes the message of the picture. In Andrea Damp’s pictures, the interplay between reality and dream, fantasy and fact always manifests itself as a decisive component of the content.

Andrea Damp was awarded the Lucas Cranach Scholarship of the City of Wittenberg in 2008, the Karl Hofer Scholarship in 2008-2010, the 2nd place of the Franz Hecker Scholarship and the scholarship of the foundation Käthe-Dorsch-und-Agnes-Straub-Stiftung.

In 2010 she won the Prize for Painting of the foundation Dorothea-Konwiarz-Stiftung. Since 2014 she has held a teaching position at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) in Hamburg.