Mirjam Völker works with paint, but she thinks three-dimensionally. In her large-format paintings, she creates scenarios that are almost photographically illuminated and situated between worlds in a reality peculiar to her pictures. In this reality, natural components and housing built by humans work together and against each other; this realm has its own laws of gravity and light, perspective and spatiality, reality and fantasy. Her scenes seem deceptively real and graspable or traversable, but this realism never conceals what it is: painting. In a constant interplay between dualisms – light and shadow, surface and volume, the constructed and the grown – the pictures are always based on the creation of an atmospheric impression, whereby provisional housing takes on the role of leitmotif and runs through her entire oeuvre. (...) The interplay between people and nature always plays out, but it is left unclear whether the human being with his housing displaces the natural structures or vice versa. (…)

Excerpt from the text by Leonie Pfennig