Alexandra Deutsch

Biography

Alexandra Deutsch was born in Karlsruhe in 1968, the daughter of a sculptor and a teacher of textile design. From 1988 to 1995, she studied Fine Arts at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, which took her to the École des Beaux Arts in Dijon, France, in 1992 as part of a semester abroad. In 2006, she held a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts in Mainz. She lives and works in Wiesbaden.
Even during her university studies, she was particularly attracted to colours and her aim was to make them grow from the conventional, two-dimensional plane into something three-dimensional and organic. As part of her training in Mainz, which was based on the Bauhaus principle of working with a wide variety of materials, she discovered paper for the realisation of her ideas. She creates the paper herself. After the drying process, the workpiece is painted with self-mixed colours that contain a high proportion of pigments, which are responsible for the strong luminosity of her works.
Between 2005 and 2019, several artist-in-residence scholarships took her to Brazil, Peru, Colombia, India and Paris for several months at a time, where she found new inspiration for her work. During these stays abroad, she also worked on the design of textile objects, inspired by the abundance of colourful fabrics in the South American tradition.
Her oeuvre has won several awards and is regularly presented in exhibitions in Europe and South America. Most recently, her works were shown in Zehnthaus and Colmar, as well as this summer in Wiesbaden and at the Paper Academy in Gilleleje, Denmark. She is currently preparing to take part in Papier Global 5 at the Stadtmuseum Deggendorf and the Biennale Européene des Blancs Manteaux in Paris, as well as the exhibition ‘Origins and Destinations. 35 years IAPMA, international association of paper makers and paper artists’ at the Capellades Paper Mill Museum in Spain.

‘My works have a pronounced individuality, each form has an inner tension, there are small cracks, small changes where you notice that there is history, nothing is flawless, it's about telling a story in the detail, in the colour, in the material, in these very breaks."¹ (Alexandra Deutsch)

¹From a conversation with Sophie Cieslar on 8 June 2017.