Galerie Judith Andreae

Pia Ferm’s still young artistic work moves between sculpture and painterly drawing. From pencil sketches and watercolor drawings, she creates hand-tufted and woven tapestries that are in dialogue with the sculptures and the surrounding architecture. The recurring reference in her work to the classic „image“ of the drawing can be seen in the process of creating the textile and sculptural bodies. Pia Ferm forms her symbolic motifs and abstract images by tufting and cutting the wool surface of a tapestry or by chiseling out and exposing a stone. The works are characterized by the artist’s tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, which is simultaneously offset by the inconspicuousness and delicacy of the materiality and feel of her works. „Even though my textile works might play with its references to painting my tapestries maintain an almost coquettish relationship with this classical genre, being much closer in expression to a drawing, a collage or a graphic print. My free-standing objects refer in their formal execution to pictograms, stylised, „naive“ drawings, but also to comic strips. They are intended to enter into a dialogue with the wall objects, and thus, enable the stories forged around them to float freely in the room. One could say that I understand my works as a sort of personal sign language that unfolds in the space where they are shown. (…) Many of my works represent images that relate associatively to still life and private interiors. I also draw and bend the logic from these classical motive genres when I make formal decisions for my compositions. Both while building up the motif and while bringing the work to life in its final material.“ – Pia Ferm

Pia Ferm (*1986 Lysekil, Sweden) studied printmaking and painting at the Dômen Artschool in Gothenburg from 2011 to 2014. She graduated from the Städelschule in 2020 as a master student in Tobias Rehberger’s class in Fine Arts. In addition to numerous prizes and scholarships that Pia Ferm has received, including the Ottilie Roederstein Young Talent Scholarship from the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art in 2022; the travel scholarship from the Hans and Stefan Bernbeck Foundation in 2020; the Förderpreis der Künstlerhilfe Frankfurt e.V. in 2019 and the Helge Ax:son Jonsson Stiftelse scholarship in 2017, the artist has already exhibited in national and international institutions and galleries. In 2019, the Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden exhibited works by Pia Ferm for the first time in the solo show „good breed“; in 2021, the artist’s first solo exhibition „bread an butter“ followed at Galerie Judith Andreae, Bonn; in 2022, the Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden-Rot showed selected wall works in the group exhibition ‚Mit den Füßen sehen – Der Teppich in der zeitgenössischen Kunst‘; this was followed in 2023 by participation in the show ‚And This is Us 2023‘ at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and the solo show „karton“ at Galeriehaus Nord, Nuremberg. In January 2024 Pia Ferm opened her first solo exhibition in her home country Sweden, in cooperation with Saskia Neuman Gallery, Stockholm. Pia Ferm lives and works in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Based in the historic building of the former Bach-School, Galerie Judith Andreae was founded in 2012. In its program, the gallery shows not only established artists such as photographer and sculptor Johannes Brus, concept artist Rune Mields, media artist Achim Mohné and light artist Regine Schumann, but also emerging and younger positions, such as the paintress Lunita-July Dorn, sculptress Pia Ferm and the Berlin based painter Lukas Glinkowski which are offered a platform in the historical and light-flooded rooms of the gallery. A main focus of the gallery is the promotion of artistic contemporary positions which, in their specific medium, be it photography, installation, digital art, sculpture or painting, are dedicated to the theme of nature in the broadest sense and its integration into social-political discourse. A curatorial challenge is presented by the exhibition formats in which the gallery’s artists are offered the opportunity to enter into dialogue with guest artists thus addressing issues raised by art since 1960 until today.