Feuchtenberger, Anke

Shortly before the Berlin Wall came down, Anke Feuchtenberger, Henning Wagenbreth, Holger Fickelscherer and Detlef Beck joined together and founded a ‘Produktions-genossenschaft des Handwerks’ (production cooperative for handicrafts - PGH for short), called ‘Glühende Zukunft’, or ‘Glowing Future’. During its four-year existence, they came to public attention through their artistic activities in public spaces, such as graffiti and wall paintings. They were motivated by creative actionism that was an expression of their political opposition. After the collapse of the Communist system, the individual artists in the East Berlin artists’ collective were very much in demand, particularly for their theatre posters, but also amongst book publishers and the print media for their illustrations. At the same time they were using their comic-like work to experiment with the visual forms of expression within the two different cultures and combining the aesthetics of East-European graphics and illustration with the Western narrative tradition of the comic. Feuchtenberger's work has many outlets and includes paintings, drawings, posters, prints, costume, puppets, cartoon films – as well as comics, of course.

Her first comics drawings are dominated by angular contours, portraying characters and objects in hard lines. Their design is reminiscent of woodcut and linocut prints. The colouring is modest and restrained, with the individual areas being accentuated instead by opulent or minimal ornamentation.

Now the artists has turned mainly to charcoal for her drawings. On the coarse-grained paper, the lines become blurred, blending with the fine powder of the grey shades in the shadows and outlines. The trained commercial artist unites words and images to form a graphically united texture, with only an indirect connection to the narrative level.

Anke Feuchtenberger usually works with the author Katrin de Vries. Together they develop stories and bring the images and the words into line with each other, as in Die kleine Dame (1997), Die Hure H (1996), Die Hure H zieht ihre Bahnen (2003) and Die Hure H wirft den Handschuh (2007). Her enigmatic portrayals have a somnambulistic character, which is reflected in both the surreal motifs and in the cryptic combinations of words. Observers must fill in the space between image and text for themselves, in order to be able to unite the individual fragments.

Sexuality and physicality are the central themes that Anke Feuchtenberger confronts in her comics. In Das Haus (2001), she divides the human body into thirty parts. In five to six pictures for each part, she reduces and condenses individual terms with the aid of metaphors and symbols. Instead of telling a story, Feuchtenberger creates visual and textual chains of associations, which initially appear to be separate from each other, but which achieve a profound or ambiguous expressive power when combined.

In 1997 Feuchtenberger was made Professor of Illustration at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften in Hamburg. Since then her teaching has shaped and supported a new generation of German illustrators and comic-book illustrators such as Sascha Hommer, Arne Bellstorf and Line Hoven. Then, together with Stefano Ricci, she founded the Mami Verlag publishing house with the aim of publishing not only her own stories but in particular the stories of younger illustrators, as there are very few publishing opportunities for more experimental creations.

Alongside books by Gosia Machon, Jul Gordon, Birgit Weyhe, Stefan Ricci and an anthology of work by her students, Mami Verlag also published a book by Feuchtenberger herself. wehwehsupertraene.de is a collection of pictures that were drawn between 2006 and 2008 as preparatory work for Feuchtenberger's new character Supertears. Feutchtenberger had already introduced her latest heroine in the last Hure H book, but as she started to draw her “the pictures took on a life of their own. I no longer wanted to squeeze the pictures, which virtually drew themselves, into a narrative form.” In the book each drawing stands alone and at the same time is connected to the others. “How the pictures come together, in which space they developed, was important to me” says Feuchtenberger. And the space that exists between the very expressive pictures pulls the observer in, as do the expressive motifs.

In wehwehwehsupertraene.de Anke Feuchtenberger has created an idiosyncratic hybrid. On the one hand each picture stands alone and on the basis of the power of that picture offers a wealth of stories. On the other hand, the observers knows that the pictures are all connected to each other and so makes that connection. And as there is no text and no apparent narrative, this happens at a very subliminal level. And so one dives into a surreal world of pictures that conceals a wealth of secretive stories within it.