Cosima von Bonin does not like to explain her art, and instead prefers to leave the interpretation of the empty spaces to her audience. The German artist's oeuvre is as diverse as it is enigmatic and includes installations, films, sculptures, textiles, murals, photography, performance and music, which critically scrutinise the very fabric of society as a profound panorama.
(...) Continue readingCosima von Bonin - Studies in Hamburg; graduation in Cologne
Cosima von Bonin was born in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1962, and spent the first four years of her life in Africa, where her father worked as a shipping manager for a cement factory. In 1967, the family returned to Europe and settled in Salzburg. The desire to become an artist led Cosima von Bonin to Hamburg in 1988, where she studied for a year with the painter Werner Büttner (born 1954); however, she considers her time at the Walther König bookshop in Cologne to be the most formative for her artistic career. Cosima von Bonin counts such diverse artistic personalities as the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976), the Romanian conceptual artist André Cadere (1934-1978), the German artist Isa Genzken (born 1948), the American conceptual artist Cady Noland (born 1956), the American film director George A. Romero (1940-2017) and the French filmmaker Jacques Tati (1907-1983) among the important influences on her work.
Brightly coloured installations with dark undertones
With her complex artistic concept, Cosima von Bonin refuses to be pigeonholed. Existing classifications are too small for the artist, as is the art market itself, which she perceives as a ‘raging war’, from which she has already withdrawn in good time by ‘desertion’. This has not detracted from her success; her staged installations attract and fascinate critics and audiences alike. Cosima von Bonin is just as reticent with biographical details as she is with explanations and commentaries on her artistic work; she prefers to let her work speak for itself. For her exhibition Who's Exploiting Who in the Deep Sea?, the artist composed a psychologically profound poetic parallel world in which plush sea creatures can be found alongside a gigantic bikini and beach huts. For her work Missy Misdemeanour, she simply placed a giant plush chick on a red rocket. In doing so, the boundaries between play and statement, social portrait and social criticism are fluid and hard to discern with certainty.
Successful exhibitions and collaborations with musicians
Cosima von Bonin began her extensive exhibition activities in the 1990s, which have long since brought her international recognition. She took part in documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007 and the Biennale di Venezia in 2022. Since 2000, she has collaborated with the singer and writer Dirk von Lowtzow (born 1971), known as the frontman of the rock band Tocotronic; she named her exhibition Wir sind viele after a song by the band and von Lowtzow wrote corresponding press texts. In 2009, she began her occasional collaboration with techno musician Moritz von Oswald (born 1962), for whom she designed several covers and whose music accompanies her exhibitions. Cosima von Bonin teaches at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg. Through the German painter, sculptor and installation artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997), she met fellow artist Michael Krebber (born 1954), to whom she has been married since 1992.
Cosima von Bonin lives and works in Cologne.
Cosima von Bonin - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
