NADJA POPPE

In the course of time my practice in portraiture has changed from focusing on the external body to the internal emotional state. Important for me are form and the weight given to pictorial elements by sharpness and blurring, bright and dark, depth and flatness, by transparency and layering.

Studying Chinese calligraphy inspired me to paint portraits with ink on Chinese paper and ultimately led me to abstract the portraits. Now I work exclusively with black, using Indian ink, charcoal or graphite on paper and gouache on canvas. The use of gouache and graphite open a wide spectrum of shades of grey, spaces, lines and structures for me. Besides these materials the eraser is an important tool for developing my forms. I use people and dolls as well as my memory of them as models.

Nadja Poppe, born 1983 in Großenhain, Saxony, lives and works in Dresden, Germany. She studied Painting and Drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden and spent a year studying at the Universidad de Castilla – La Mancha in Cuenca, Spain, to absolve an Erasmus scholarship. Studying Chinese calligraphy promted her to focus on all shades between black and white. Poppe joined a postgraduate studies with main focus in drawing, with Prof. Elke Hopfe and Prof. Wolfram Adalbert Scheffler. She graduate with an MFA in 2013.

Poppes works are in several private and public collections, among them works the Cultural Foundation of Saxony. Besides having exhibited in numerous group exhibitions all over Germany, she had a comprehensive solo exhibition 2017 in the Neue Sächsische Galerie Chemnitz, a museum in Saxony.