LUCIA KEMPKES & ROSALIE BECHER | Art Düsseldorf

Art Düsseldorf 2026 opening April 16: With Lucia Kempkes (*1988) and Rosalie Becher (*2000), we present two female artists who are reimagining traditional crafts with remarkable contemporary relevance. In an age of digital acceleration, both artists consciously opt for time-intensive, craft-based processes – not as a nostalgic look back, but as a progressive strategy to translate traditional materials into a new, contemporary visual language.

Rosalie Becher, who will graduate as a master’s student at the academy in Düsseldorf this summer, works with the medium of stained glass – a material historically linked to the visual language of sacred architecture. In her works, she translates this tradition into a contemporary visual world of urban fragments, façades, symbols and vistas. Light functions here not only as a material, but also as a narrative element. Her engagement with historical techniques even led her to collaborate on the restoration of a window element at Notre Dame, Paris – an experience that has had a lasting impact on her relationship with the history of materials.

Lucia Kempkes draws on the tradition of textile weaving and develops a painterly practice from it. Her works begin as paintings on individual threads, which are subsequently woven into fabrics. The result are shimmering textile landscapes whose motifs depict resilient plants capable of surviving even under extreme climatic conditions. Navigating between speculations about the future and poetic nostalgia, Kempkes reinterprets the tradition of landscape representation – except that here the ‘canvas’ itself is a living, textured fabric. The new series, which is being presented for the first time at Art Düsseldorf, follows the artist’s conceptual approach; she continually reflects on and expands her practice through teaching – not least through visiting professorships at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Berlin University of the Arts.

Art Düsseldorf |17. – 19. April 2026 | Opening: 16. April | Galerie Judith Andreae | Booth J09