Nina Hofstetter

The Diploma Exhibition presents a culmination of my studies — a reflection of the skills, ideas, and visual explorations developed throughout my artistic journey.

Stillness in Motion

My work explores a theme that cannot be told as a completed story, but can only be described as a state. It begins with a continuous experience of movement without arrival — not in a biographical sense, but as an attentive perception of the present moment.

I am interested in how identity, orientation, and time feel when they are no longer directed toward progress, a goal, or clear belonging. Movement occurs without anything fully resolving. This state shapes my pictorial spaces as well as the way figures, architecture, and landscapes appear within them.

My works depict no concrete locations. Instead, they create inner spaces — pictorial worlds that gather mental, emotional, and remembered landscapes. These spaces are not ordered or stable, but shifted, layered, and fragmented. Inside and outside, imagination and reality, past and present are deliberately intertwined. All images are variations of the same condition: stillness in motion.

At first glance, the paintings appear calm, almost harmonious. Yet a closer look reveals their instability. Architecture leads to emptiness, transitions remain incomplete, foregrounds and backgrounds begin to dissolve. Figures and animals are present but do not act decisively. They wait, observe, or seem trapped in their niches.

I do not see these figures as psychologically developed characters, but as states — a structural feeling of being both present and withdrawn. Fragmentation, in this sense, is not a personal deficit but a historically and socially produced experience. In a world shaped by multilingualism, multiple affiliations, acceleration, and simultaneous exhaustion, identity becomes unstable and contradictory.

I deliberately work in oil painting because it allows a slow, controlled, and contemplative process. Through glazing and semi-opaque layers, soft transitions, and muted, misty colors, the paintings evoke memory and dream.

This painterly process is closely tied to the content. Motifs emerge, shift, lose their function, and reorganize. Instability becomes a productive state that I consciously pursue. The painting itself becomes a space for negotiation.

Conceptually, the works hover between storytelling and dwelling. Narrative fragments hint at rituals, myths, stages, transitions, or idyllic moments — yet they do not form a linear story. I deliberately overload the narrative until it comes to a standstill. Movement occurs without development.

Motifs such as carousels, architectural loops, or empty transitional spaces embody this state. The carousel promises motion but produces repetition. The waterslide promises intensity but remains potential. Gestures, rituals, and structures suggest meaning without delivering it. Time appears not linear, but layered — past, present, and memory overlapping.

I understand this visual logic as a reflection of a present in which narratives are omnipresent but no longer binding. Everything is explained, archived, and told — yet a shared direction is absent. History loops, crises repeat, and solutions remain provisional.

My artistic approach is deliberately calm and restrained. This restraint is not a refusal to take a position, but a form of resistance against overproduction, clarity, and instant readability.

In summary, I see my work as an attempt to condense a contemporary state of experience into painting: a life in-between, in loops, in unstable spaces. The paintings are places where stillness and movement, closeness and withdrawal, familiarity and unease exist simultaneously. In this sense, I position my practice as a form of painting that embraces uncertainty rather than resolves it.