Ellen Akimoto - Protagonists

Opening with the artist as part of the season launch of the Frankfurt galleries on September 8 at 7 PM

Ellen Akimoto's scenes unfold in two-dimensional spaces, blending fantasy, memory, and dreams. A room with yellow walls and an arched window, behind which a changing mountain landscape appears. A carpet or wooden floor, angled in parallel perspective to better showcase the pattern. Ornaments seem to be dragged and dropped into the visual world: the curtain, the vase, the cup, the tablecloth, the colorful blouse.

On these stages, three-dimensional actors frequently, but not reliably, make their appearance. The artist herself, a rubber tree, a tomcat, a blonde woman, a man without pants, a horse, a tattooed man, ducks. The setting is simple, yet the impact is profound and lasting. These images captivate.

To the left of a kissing couple lies a book on Giotto on the dresser. The Italian master embodies the dawn of three-dimensional painting, the Renaissance, and Humanism. What is it that we experience 700 years later?

Ellen Akimoto was born in 1988 in Westlake Village, California. She studied at California State University, Chico, the Mainz University of Applied Sciences, and as a master student of Annette Schröter at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.