How I Accidentally Started a Magazine

SHORT DESCRIPTION

How lockdown, an absurdly enormous industrial building, 500,000 photographs, seven lost kilos, a

serious amount of stubbornness and several printing crises eventually turned into an independent

art and photography magazine.

There was no master plan.

ÊTRE REBELLE wasn't conceived during a strategic brand workshop involving moodboards, Post-it notes

and people who use the word "purpose" far too often. The idea had been developing in my head for

years. It slowly matured while I was busy doing a thousand other things.

Then COVID happened.

At the time, I was earning my living as a DJ, musician and event manager, among other things.

Suddenly there were no parties, no events and therefore not much left to manage. Unsurprisingly,

there wasn't much money coming in either.

I had two options: I could bury my head in the sand, cry about the large house I could barely

afford, the small children and the complete lack of perspective. Or I could use the situation as an

accelerator and finally push my photography career forward.

I chose the second option - if only because it's difficult to take photographs with your head

buried in the sand.

NOT BLACKJACK AND HOOKERS, BUT ART

During the pandemic, several grants for artists became available. I applied, actually received some

of them and invested the money not in blackjack and hookers, but - shockingly responsibly - in my

projects.

Through my other jobs, I already knew virtually every event organizer, restaurateur and company CEO

in my hood. I'm a bit of a local VIP around here - although it's less red carpet and more: "Oh, we

know Patrick. He played here once or organized some event for us."

Among other places, I had worked for the Zollverein Foundation, which operates and programs the

UNESCO World Heritage Site Zollverein. During COVID, I asked whether they might have any suitable

spaces available for photo shoots.

So I walked around the Kokerei, the former coking plant, with one of their employees. It is an

enormous industrial complex covering roughly 14,000 square meters, with five floors, rooms

up to 20 meters high and an absolutely incredible industrial atmosphere.

Helge Jepsen on black lines, difficult rims, beautiful cars, stoner rock, and the art of not wanting to be an artist.

“I am a service provider who can handle a pencil reasonably well.”
Helge Jepsen is an illustrator, communication designer, collector of cars on paper, and a declared non-artist. Born in Flensburg, he has lived and worked in Essen since the mid-eighties. For years, he drew automobiles for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, illustrated books and magazines, portrayed the collections of passionate car lovers, and is one of the minds behind Dukes of Downtown, an Essen-based event for vehicles with character rather than mere status polish. And yet he says: “I am a service provider who can handle a pencil reasonably well.”
That may sound like understatement, but above all it is an attitude. Jepsen distrusts the label of artist whenever it becomes more important than the work itself. What interests him is craft, form, commission, and the daily joy of making something come into being. Sometimes it is a BMW 507, sometimes the twentieth Mazda. The standard remains the same. Only when the light and the cast shadow are right is the image finished. Then it may go on the wall. Or, as his exhibition is called: This Can Go.

THIS CAN GO

In German, the phrase usually asks whether something is art or ready for the bin. Helge Jepsen turns it into a verdict of completion: the work is finished, released, and ready to leave the studio. The line is drawn. The shadow sits. Now it can find its place.

ÊTRE REBELLE: You insist rather stubbornly that you are not an artist. Why?

HELGE JEPSEN: I very deliberately studied communication design. Back then it was called graphic design. Even as a teenager, I was not only interested in drawing, but also in the useful aspect of it. I wanted to design school newspapers, make covers, develop mascots or posters. I never thought it was uncool when someone said: “I need something. Make this for me.” I did not want to produce a hundred things and then wait for someone to eventually come along and say: “Well, isn’t that beautiful?”
That is why I call myself a service provider. If someone commissions me to do five portraits or a car, I do the work, enjoy the pressure, and a month later I enjoy the money. With that, I buy myself time for the things I make only for myself.

THE REFUSAL OF THE ARTIST MYTH

Jepsen does not reject art. He rejects the decorative fog around it. For him, the work matters more than the label.

ÊR: At the same time, you sound very much like someone who could not live particularly well without drawing.

HJ: That is true. When a commission is finished, I often immediately feel like continuing to draw. Then I make abandoned places I have seen while travelling, or another car. I simply draw the vehicles I would like to own. In that sense, my collection is quite complete.
I also never talked much about what I might want to do someday. I did it. When I spend two or three days on a drawing, I go to bed in the evening looking forward to it, because I know I get to continue working on it the next morning.

ÊR: Where does your resistance to the term artist come from?

HJ: I have met too many people who emphasized in every third sentence that they were artists. Then you look at the work and think: this might have been better with a little less self-explanation.
The people I truly consider artists speak differently about their work. They talk about what torments them, what drives them, or what joy they feel. Sometimes I do not like their colors, sometimes the pieces are crude or technically not perfect at all. And yet something comes out of it that has necessity.
Perhaps art comes from a higher, or at least a different, ambition than my commissioned work. But I do not necessarily need the label.
“Maybe art comes from a higher, or at least a different, ambition than my commissioned work. But I do not necessarily need the label.”

ÊR: You were already drawing as a child?

HJ: A lot. In my memory, my afternoons consisted one hundred percent each of football, television, reading, friends, and drawing. Mathematically that does not work, but that is how it feels.
A professor’s sentence became a quiet artistic instruction: leave the idol out, and the line becomes your own.

ÊR: When did cars become your central subject?

HJ: According to my parents, my first understandable word was “Nono.” My father drove a Renault at the time, and I kept pointing at the car. He was completely car-crazy himself, of course in an affordable league. When I came home with my first Porsche in the late nineties, he was incredibly proud and then told everyone about it without being asked.
I have always liked idiosyncratic cars. My favorite shape is the shooting brake, this mixture of sports car and estate. I had a Volvo 480, a Reliant, and to this day I drive a BMW Z3 Coupé. When I bought it, some people said: “One of the most beautiful cars in the world.” Others thought it was completely ugly. Nothing in between. That is exactly what I like.
With unlimited money, by the way, I would buy my own car again. Just once more, new, in the same configuration and with zero kilometers. Maybe that explains the spirit of Dukes of Downtown as well: it is not about owning the most expensive or loudest car in the room, but one that has attitude.

AUTOMOTIVE ATTITUDE, NOT STATUS POLISH

Dukes of Downtown is not about the loudest, rarest, or most expensive machine. It is about character, form, history, and the beauty of not being instantly understood.
ÊR: Is that love for idiosyncratic cars also how Dukes of Downtown came into being?
HJ: Yes. Philipp and I wanted to create an event alongside the Tour de Rü for cars that we personally find cool. Not only classic vintage cars, not only the usual prestige objects, but also vehicles you rarely see or that only become interesting at second glance.
That might be an Opel Kadett, a Ford Capri, a Renault 5, or even an unusual new car. We are not a purely classic-car event. We are not only interested in whether a car is rare or expensive. For us, it has to have character.
Sometimes someone gets in touch and says: “I have this or that car, there are only five of them.” And we may still say: nice, but it does not fit us.
One of our unspoken conditions is also that the car really belongs to the person who arrives with it. The registration papers should not be lying at the bank. These pure poser cars that basically belong to the leasing company or the manufacturer do not interest us very much.

ÊR: So more automotive attitude than status show.

HJ: Exactly. We care about cars with history, form, individuality. Things that not everyone understands immediately.

ÊR: What makes a car interesting to draw?

HJ: A good form. With the BMW 507, the body runs from front to back in one single sweep. That kind of thing is a pleasure. Well-designed Porsches or Ferraris are wonderful too. When drawing, you retrace the designer’s work and only then realize how precisely these shapes are constructed.
What I do not like are cars with five thousand creases, folds, and artificial edges. Through my work for the FAZ, I was given new fold-monsters every week. They are often uglier and at the same time more elaborate to draw.
And I hate wire-spoke wheels. A spoke is not simply a line. It consists of two lines, a light edge, a shadow edge, and it interlocks spatially with the others. You cannot invent that. You really have to draw it.
“You cannot invent a spoke. You really have to draw it.”

ÊR: How does one of your illustrations come into being?

HJ: It always begins with the preliminary drawing. Earlier on paper, today directly on a Wacom Cintiq. Then comes the black outline. My most formative comic influence was Hergé with Tintin. I always liked that ligne claire, that clear black line.
Then comes the base color. At this intermediate stage I often think: actually, the image could stay like this. It is then most clearly a drawing. Later, some people ask whether it is a photograph.
After that, I build up light, reflections, and shadows. My light always comes from the upper left. That probably has a banal origin: as a right-handed person drawing on paper, I had the lamp standing on the left so that my hand would not cast a shadow on the sheet.
At the very end comes the cast shadow. When that sits, the drawing is finished. Sometimes I stop in the evening exactly before that point and already look forward to setting the cast shadow in the morning while lying in bed. Then I wake up earlier than planned and think: cast shadow, yay.
Today, a drawing consists of hundreds of Photoshop layers. In the evening I send myself a screenshot to my phone and look at it again in bed. On the small screen I see mistakes I have long become blind to on the computer.

THE SHADOW IS THE FINAL WORD

For Jepsen, the image is not finished when everything is visible. It is finished when the cast shadow sits.

ÊR: Why does one need an illustration at all if one can photograph a car?

HJ: Because I can create a visual world that would hardly be possible photographically. I have drawn almost a thousand cars. They all stand in a similar perspective, with the same kind of light and without random trees, houses, or skylines reflected in the paint.
If you searched the entire world for photos of all these models, you would never get such a coherent series. I reduce the car to form, color, and light. It is another kind of portrait.
With private collectors there is another aspect. In the past, English aristocrats hung paintings of their horses in their libraries. They could not constantly be in the stable, but they wanted to be surrounded by their animals. Some car collectors do the same today. They hang their vehicles in the man cave.
Through my collaboration with the Ferrari specialist magazine Maranello World, one collector first had seven Ferraris drawn, then two more. Then he remembered another two he had forgotten. That is a scale of problem I would also like to have.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF PORTRAIT

The drawing removes accident. No random trees, no foreign reflections, no borrowed skyline in the paint. Only form, color, light, and the machine’s true face.

ÊR: When is a work truly finished?

HJ: You have to learn to say at some point: finished. Put it away. Next image.
Or you say: this is shit. Then it is also finished, but it goes to a different place.
Of course I could spend twenty days on one image and give every leaf even more structure. But would that make it better? Would anyone even see it later? The job and all the deadlines have taught me to set an endpoint.
By the way, I have never missed a deadline. That is professional honor.

FINISHED. PUT IT AWAY. NEXT IMAGE.

The discipline is not only in the drawing. It is in knowing when to stop.

ÊR: Your exhibition is called This Can Go. What can really go?

HJ: The title first means: the works may be sold and leave this place. Not into the bin.
But if I actually had to dispose of something, it would be commissions where I already knew beforehand that too much was coming from outside. Too many specific instructions, too little room of my own. You do it anyway because it pays a month’s rent or because you want to do someone a favor. It gets printed, but you are not happy with it.
“Everything can go that has no heartblood in it.”

ÊR: What soundtrack do your images have?

HJ: Guitar-heavy desert rock. Queens of the Stone Age, Slomosa, things like that. I have playlists called Noise and Super Noise. When I sit at the computer at night with headphones on, one or the other plays, depending on the level of concentration.
Music has always been more important to me than engines, pencils, or bars. Early on The Cure, later Pixies, Rage Against the Machine, and the whole independent scene. When I first saw Rage Against the Machine as an almost unknown support band at the time, a murmur went through the hall. Everyone knew immediately: this is new. This was not there before.

NOISE, SUPER NOISE, AND THE CLEAR BLACK LINE

The soundtrack is desert rock. The method is discipline. The result is a world where chrome, color, and shadow behave exactly as they should.

ÊR: What is a rebel to you?

HJ: If I have rebelled, then mostly with humor. Not pathetically and rarely aggressively. More with an action, a remark, or a loose mouth.
Humor gets you through an astonishing number of situations in which it is better not to think for too long. If one wants to call that rebellious, then my rebellion probably consists of humor, a big mouth, and occasionally driving deliberately too fast.

For ÊR, however, we are not only interested in the musician. We are interested in the painter. The man who self-ironically places himself in the corner of the “old white man”, not to claim importance, but rather to undermine his own. An artist who speaks of “splashing paint around” and at the same time knows very precisely why an image works, when it sounds wrong, how a single brush hair can change a painting, and why a golden spot in a treetop can suddenly become more than decoration. Niehusmann does not paint out of pose. He paints out of seeing. His images emerge where everyday life suddenly becomes graphic, where order, color, rhythm, and disruption begin to intertwine.

ÊR: When I asked you about this interview, you wondered whether it was really interesting to talk to an old white man about a bit of splashing paint around. How should I understand that?

Volker Niehusmann: I am no longer thirty. I am white, and I splash paint around. There are important painters, unimportant painters, and decorative painters, and I do not really know exactly where I belong. It is not that important to me either. First of all, I do it for myself. If other people think it is great, of course I am happy about that. But I believe that even painters in completely different price ranges sometimes see it in a similar way.

ÊR: You devoted decades to classical guitar and led the guitar department at the Folkwang University of the Arts for many years. That is an art form that is extremely precise, but also fleeting. A tone appears and immediately disappears. A painting, on the other hand, remains. Is painting therefore a kind of counterbalance for you?

VN: Absolutely. Nobody says to you: paint your picture again tonight. You can play a piece of music twice. But you cannot paint the same picture twice. Then you are painting a different one. Music is abstract, perhaps even mathematical, depending on how one thinks or composes. A lot happens in the head. And it is fleeting. With painting, it is different. I do not analyze things beforehand with color wheels. It is more intuitive. And I take pleasure in the long-lasting result. In that sense, it is the perfect counterbalance to music for me.

ÊR: You have repeatedly given your exhibitions the title Painting as a Foreign Language. Why a foreign language?

VN: Because painting is not my mother tongue. Music was the first great language. Painting is something that comes out of me, but it is not what I learned academically. That is why I also feel a little estranged from it. Perhaps that is also why I sometimes speak so disrespectfully of splashing paint around.
When it comes to painting, I am actually rather modest. I know there are many painters on the market who are much worse than I am. But compared to the painting that truly overwhelms me, I could not measure up in a thousand years. When I think of Jan van Eyck, of Bruegel, of the Dutch painters in general, or also of contemporary artists who bring a compelling idea incredibly precisely to the point, then what I do, in my own eyes, is still splashing paint around.

ÊR: How much Bob Ross is there in your artistic education?

VN: Bob Ross came relatively late for me. But I always liked one thought of his very much: that mistakes are not catastrophes, but small accidents from which something new can emerge. I like that positive attitude. If a painting really goes wrong, you can laugh about it. Then you take some paint, make everything white again, and start over.

ÊR: What was your first contact with color?

VN: Painting by numbers. My parents gave me a set for Christmas. A sailing ship. That kept me busy for a while. And in a way, my work today is still a little like painting by numbers. There are fields that I imagine, and then I know: this color has to go there, another one over there. Only now, I make up the numbers myself in my head.

ÊR: Is being self-taught a flaw for you, or rather a luxury?

VN: An absolute luxury. I do not have to feel indebted to anyone. Not to any school, not to any teacher. I can paint what I like. If I feel like trying something different, I try something different. Nobody told me: you have to stay within this color circle; people no longer paint on canvas today; people no longer paint figuratively today; today one has to be abstract. None of that interests me. I do what I feel like doing, and that is it. In that sense, it is an advantage to be self-taught. No teacher except one’s own eyes.
I always wondered how Klimt was able to bring gold into his paintings. Earlier, I thought that was a sick idea. Today, I find it wonderful. I painted a small picture, a view into an avenue, and there are golden spots in the trees, like refractions of light. I think it became a beautiful painting. Gold has become a special color for me.
With Klimt, gold is not only this sacred nimbus that one knows from older religious images. It is not simply a statement saying: this is holy. It is part of the image. A pictorial color. That is what I find special.
I used to have greater difficulties with pink and violet. I learned to appreciate pink through Lucian Freud, through those skin tones and also the ugliness that can lie within them. Violet as a color in shadow irritated me at first. But when you really look at shadows outside, you realize: those people were seeing very well. They showed us how the world is.

ÊR: You have also spoken very critically about the art market. At the same time, with figures like Beltracchi, you seem to like precisely that Eulenspiegel moment in which a system is exposed.

VN: I often find this art scene quite dreadful. It is not only about quality. There are mechanisms behind why someone gets into a museum, why something becomes highly priced, why something works. That does not always have anything to do with the quality of the painting.
With Beltracchi, of course, it is clear: according to law and justice, he is a criminal. But the way he exposed this art market also has something sympathetic about it for me. He showed how much this system is based on attribution, names, market, and assertion.
I myself am not the type who pushes his way into such a scene. If gallery owners or people see my paintings, like them, and want to support them, I am grateful. But I have little interest in forcing my way into the art market.

ÊR: The gallery context in which you now also appear is called Kunst aus Essen. What is your relationship to Essen and the Ruhr area as a place of art? Does one not sometimes have to be in New York or London?

VN: I do not think so. You do not have to live in New York to make art. In New York, perhaps, if you are lucky, you can make a huge career very quickly. But you are also one among very many there. I think the Ruhr area is actually cool. I like the people here. There is an active art scene, even if it is not always that visible. Perhaps people from the Ruhr area are not the kind who immediately push themselves to the front and make a lot of noise. They tinker away by themselves first, in the allotment garden, grow potatoes, and get by. I find that sympathetic.
I have a conflicted relationship with Essen, but I was born here and stayed here. I am more Bach than Handel. Bach did not constantly travel the world either. The largest painting I have made is actually a panorama of Essen. Two canvases, together about three meters wide. Churches appear in it, architecture, the Grugahalle, tramways, mining towers, city history. I tried to paint a synthesis of this city, not realistically, but divided into fields and colors. There, too, I thought again of August Macke.

ÊR: What advice would the guitarist Volker Niehusmann give to the painter Volker Niehusmann?

VN: A well-founded opinion of one’s own is the most important thing. Be alert. Look closely. Form an opinion. And then one may also stand by that opinion. In music as in painting. If I have understood how someone did something, I can learn from it. Why does Klimt’s gold work the way it does? Why does Picasso work the way he does? Why does an image composition function? One can draw from that. But one has to look closely.

ÊR: What is a good painting?

VN: This may sound banal, but: when it touches me. Then it is a good painting. Being touched does not have to mean that I find it beautiful. It can also irritate me or upset me. But it has to trigger something in me. If it does not do that, it remains silent.

ÊR: Perhaps that is the difference between decoration and art.

VN: A painting does not have to be loud. But it has to say something. And if it says something, then one should also be willing to listen to it.

Leo Namislow does not think of art as a fixed discipline, but as a form of freedom in motion. His work is shaped by density, friction, mistakes, and the courage to follow what was never fully planned. In conversation with Être Rebelle, he speaks about detours, rebellion, social tensions, and why freedom, for him, is not only an attitude but also a method.

ÊR: What kind of child were you before you became an artist?

Leo: A dreamer. I always loved drawing, and I never lost that. And like many artists, I was never really made for that rigid Prussian school system. After school, it was clear that I wanted to do something creative, even if life first pushed itself on me in a more practical way. I trained as a stonemason, which brought me strongly into the sculptural, and I worked for several years as a journeyman. That shaped the way I look at form, material, and physicality. But the desire to work freely was always there.

ÊR: When did it become clear that an ordinary life was never really an option for you?

Leo: It was less one big decision and more something that gradually revealed itself. Ordinary life imposed itself first. But through detours, jobs, contacts, and freelance work, I realized that I did not just want to work creatively. I wanted to work freely. An important moment came when a colleague brought me into a stop-motion studio and I breathed that different air for the first time. That was when I understood that there are spaces where my own work truly belongs. Later, there were also people who encouraged me not to define my path through a conventional art degree, but through my own inner drive. At some point, it became clear: I want to make my own work.

ÊR: How would you describe your art to someone who cannot see it?

Leo: I would say: I make crowded images. I am interested in the whole flood of information we live in, and I try to process it in visual language. In the end, it is about freedom. Mistakes play a major role in that. I do not move within just one kind of painting or drawing. I work across different media. I think both painterly and sculpturally. That openness is essential to me.
“Sculpture belongs to my way of thinking just as much as the image does.”

ÊR: What is formally typical of your work?

Leo: A curator once said that the contour line is central to my work. I found that very accurate. Comics, graffiti, contour, outline—those are all influences. At the same time, my gaze comes strongly from the sculptural. Through working with stone, I have always thought of form physically, as something that occupies space, has weight, and resists. That is still there in the paintings. In some images, I do not paint the line directly at all. The canvas begins as black, and what later appears as line is often just the background that has remained. So the form is created by what I do not paint.

ÊR: Your work contains a lot of density, layering, sometimes even something almost ornamental.

Leo: Yes. In these larger works, I process private and political themes, social divisions, absurdities, contradictions. I am not interested in flat statements, but in compression. I try to show things in a way that makes people look longer. So that an image does not immediately offer one clear answer, but friction.

ÊR: You sound like you give chance a lot of room.

Leo: Absolutely. In the studio, things happen on worktables that I never could have planned. Something gets wiped away, reworked, someone else works over it, somewhere a trace remains, somewhere a form appears. That is often where the most exciting things come from. You have to preserve that childlike quality. If you work too much under control, you take possibilities away from yourself.

ÊR: Where does your drive come from?

Leo: From everything. From children, family, memories, my own childhood, the state of the world, from travel, from nature, from everyday observations. Many associations arise for me through the contemplation of everyday structures, from pipes, switches, screws.

ÊR: We are called Être Rebelle. What is a rebel to you?

Leo: Rebellion is not a pose to me. The rebellious moment was when I chose my own path over security. My mother was not at all happy that I wanted to go into creative freelance work. But I followed my own path. Later, in commissioned work too, I realized that you only arrive at something truly your own if you do not let yourself be completely directed from the outside. Once you have experienced what happens when you work consistently on your own thing, you do not really want anything else anymore.

ÊR: Is that attitude also visible in your art?

Leo: Yes, absolutely. My whole life has been shaped by friction with systems. School was never my place. Later, in creative service work, it often bothered me when good ideas were discarded simply because they did not fit some desired aesthetic. In my images, I try to work against rigid camps and hardened positions. There is no point in moving further and further away from one another while only expecting the other side to take the first step.

ÊR: What affects you more: criticism or misunderstanding?

Leo: Misunderstanding. At one exhibition, I was accused of the exact opposite in a work that was actually meant to create closeness and connection. That hit me because I understand myself more as someone who builds bridges. Criticism is fine. But when someone misinterprets the work and, in front of an audience, behaves as though they are morally in the right, it becomes unpleasant.

ÊR: Are there artists you envy?

Leo: Yes, but not necessarily because of their art. I rather envy those who can play the art world more professionally than I can. Every opening, every meet-and-greet, every event. That does not come naturally to me. Family, studio, everyday life, children—all of that is there. And honestly, it is often just too much for me.

ÊR: Who shaped you?

Leo: Early on, it was Dalí, Warhol, and H. R. Giger. Then a lot came from graffiti. Later Egon Schiele, Klimt, Jugendstil in general, and the Vienna Secession. In the present, people like George Condo have been important to me. I think Hayao Miyazaki is brilliant because I am interested in that open, intuitive process, that working from the gut. But I am not interested only in painters. I am interested in artists for whom the process itself already carries meaning.
“I see myself more as someone who builds bridges.”

ÊR: What role does failure play in your work?

Leo: A big one. When you are self-taught, you fail constantly. But that is exactly where the new often comes from. I do not see anything purely negative in failure. Just recently, I had a painting for which I had a pretty good sketch. Painterly, it still did not work at all. So I had to find a completely different path. And in the end, the image landed exactly where it did because of that. No painting course could have taken me there. It happened because something did not work.

ÊR: When is an image finished?

Leo: That is the great art. Sometimes you know immediately. And sometimes you stand in front of it for three weeks and feel that something still is not right. There were paintings where, theoretically, I had done everything correctly, and still they were not finished. Then it takes time until you understand the mistake. And suddenly everything becomes clear. You cannot force that.
“You have to preserve that childlike quality.”

ÊR: If your future self looked back on this time in five years, what would it say about it?

Leo: That it was an extremely exciting time. Sources of unrest everywhere, overload everywhere, absurd rulers everywhere, a completely overheated flood of information. Of course, much of it is terrible. But for an artist, it is also material. You can make something out of all that mess, process it, make it visible. And I do not think that is going to become any less in the coming years.

ÊR: If one sentence had to be written on your gravestone, what would it be?

Leo: Love freedom.

ER: Your work seems to begin with a very specific kind of visual tension. What is it that draws you to that moment?

Yana Abramova: For a long time, I believed that seeing was something that simply happened. You look at something, recognize it, name it—glass, fabric, metal—and then move on. At some point, I realized that this automatic process was exactly what interested me most: that moment when the brain instantly creates order. My work begins precisely where that order starts to falter.

ER: Many of your images appear abstract at first glance, yet they are always rooted in something real. How do these works come into being?

YA: Many of my paintings emerge from very ordinary things: reflections in glass, folds of foil, surfaces that suddenly lose their stability under a certain kind of light. When I observe them closely, from an unusual angle or at a particular moment, they detach from their familiar meaning. What remains is color, light, and form.
At first glance, my work can seem abstract. In reality, it is always based on something tangible. It is simply that the tangible resists immediate recognition.

ER: There is a strong sense of uncertainty in your paintings, almost a slow dissolution of certainty. Is that something you deliberately pursue?

YA: Very much so. I am interested in that moment when you look at an image and think you understand what you are seeing, and then that certainty begins to dissolve. The longer you look, the less fixed the image becomes.
Perhaps that condition, that fragile space between recognition and doubt, is the true starting point of my painting.

ER: When did you first feel that your work was beginning to resonate beyond the studio?

YA: My artistic path began in Germany, and one of the first moments when I truly felt that my work could resonate beyond the studio was during an exhibition in Berlin. At the time, my mentors, teachers, and colleagues encouraged me to follow a more classical path: Europe first, perhaps New York later—the established stations of the Western art world.
But I had the feeling that something meaningful might be developing elsewhere.

ER: In 2023, you made the decision to move to Dubai. For many people, that might not have seemed like the obvious place for a painter to go. What made you take that step?

YA: In 2023, I decided to move to Dubai. For many people around me, it seemed like an unusual move, even a rebellious one, if you like. Dubai was not a place people automatically associated with a serious painting practice.
That was precisely what interested me.
I feel privileged, and genuinely excited, to be part of a region that is still in the process of shaping its cultural identity—a place where much is still emerging, with fewer fixed rules and conventions. There is a certain openness in that, and I find it incredibly energizing.

ER: What did you sense there that others perhaps did not see yet?

YA: Today, it is easier to see that my instinct was not entirely wrong. A new cultural infrastructure is taking shape here: museums are being built, international collectors are turning their attention to the region, major projects such as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi are reshaping the landscape, and art fairs like Abu Dhabi Art and Art Dubai are attracting increasing international attention.
What fascinates me is this sense of momentum. Europe has a deep and extraordinary art history, but it also carries many established structures. Here, much still feels in motion—more open, more fluid, less predictable.

ER: Your work is deeply concerned with surfaces, reflection, and the instability of appearance. Does Dubai itself feed that language?

YA: Yes, very much so. Perhaps it is no coincidence that I am working so intensely with surfaces here. Dubai is a city of glass, metal, and reflection—materials whose appearance is constantly shifting.
At the same time, the city itself is often reduced to the superficial. But I see more than that, and I am interested in sharing that way of seeing.

ER: There is a striking balance in your paintings between precision and dissolution. How conscious is that tension in the way you work?

YA: It is central to the work. My painting moves deliberately between clarity and disintegration. Some areas of an image feel almost precise, almost graspable, while others open up painterly or begin to dissolve. That tension is essential to me.
I am fascinated not only by what we see, but by how we see—by how quickly the mind produces meaning, often through a superficial scan in milliseconds, and how easily that meaning can begin to slip.

ER: What, in the end, does REBELLION mean to you?

YA: Always look beyond the surface.

The works of Anastasia Metz exist in this suspended state. They are surreal, fragmentary, and intimate. Visual stories that unfold through atmosphere, memory, and inner movement.

Raised in Tula and now living in Moscow, Anastasia’s path into art began early. Not through a single decisive moment, but through continuity. Her parents worked outside the arts, yet recognized her inclination and supported her education. She attended art school, later studied in a program with a strong artistic focus, and holds a diploma in professional photography.

Photography, in her work, unfolds across multiple levels. It is a practiced discipline, a visual language, and a source material at once. Anastasia works confidently as a photographer, creating her own images, while also drawing from other visual sources. Photographs may serve as backgrounds, foundations, or points of departure. In other instances, painterly elements or found and generated images enter the process. These different approaches do not stand in opposition. They converge.

For a long time, Anastasia worked extensively with analog photography. Through this practice, she encountered the technique of Polaroid lifting, a process that would become central to her artistic language.  Her works do not begin with a finished image, but with an inner state. A mood. A sensation. Sometimes the material itself becomes the initial impulse.

Images are selected, created, generated, or found. They are printed and then physically transformed.  In the process of Polaroid lifting, the photograph is opened. The image layer is separated from its original support. Background and foreground lose their fixed roles. The photographic surface becomes fragile, mobile, exposed. This image layer is then transferred onto another image, repositioned, overlaid, and allowed to settle into a new visual constellation.  What emerges is not a traditional collage, but a convergence of photographic practices. A dialogue between image as representation and image as material. A visual transmission of thought, memory, and feeling.

The transparent layers in Anastasia’s works carry a quiet intensity. They seem to glow from within, creating a delicate depth, as if the image itself were breathing. Light and shadow function as structural forces, holding the image together while allowing it to remain open.

Thematically, her work revolves around solitude, love, and memory. These images tell stories. Not as linear narratives, but as emotional constellations. They unfold through atmosphere, memory, and inner movement, allowing meaning to emerge. Empathy is embedded in these works. It inscribes itself into the image surface, into the fragile intersections of layers and light.

The stories remain open, emotionally charged, and present.

When asked how she knows a work is finished, her answer is simple and precise:  "When the Polaroid layer has dried."  This moment marks a point of stillness. The image has arrived.

Looking ahead, Anastasia is working toward an exhibition accompanied by a performative presentation on stage, involving a symphonic orchestra. At present, Instagram serves as her primary platform. For the near future, she seeks greater visibility and meaningful collaborations. Publications and international projects appear as natural extensions of her path.  Reflecting on this period, she describes it as transformative.  For her work. And for herself.