Fräulein Talents: Ruscha Voormann and the Art of Letting Go

Ruscha Voormann: Born in 1992, I belong to a generation that grew up between analog and digital visual worlds and was profoundly shaped by their increasing intersection. 

This dual imprint forms the starting point of my practice: I work with a classical, physical medium, yet translate the visual logics of digital images into painterly processes.

There were several triggers, but one important moment for me was the revival of Twin Peaks in 2016, when David Lynch announced the third season. For people born in the early 1990s, Twin Peaks was originally more of a myth than a series. Through the revival, many people of my generation watched it for the first time. 

What impressed me most was Lynch’s relationship to time. Perhaps precisely because he originally came from painting, he was able to let different temporalities and emotional states exist simultaneously within his films. He allowed contradictions and unanswered questions to remain unresolved and demanded that viewers endure this uncertainty.

From the moment I stopped trying to understand everything in the Twin Peaks series completely, I also began letting go of figurative narratives within my own work and moved more deeply into the timelessness of abstraction.

Art and creativity were always present in my family environment. As a result, drawing and painting became a completely natural language through which I could express myself, and so they remained.

One major change in my life that strongly influenced my art was meeting my husband, the artist Milen Till, in 2019. Back then, I was working full-time at the advertising agency Meiré und Meiré in Cologne. Besides that, I always created small windows of time in which I could paint in my tiny apartment. 

What I was still missing was artistic exchange. When Milen entered my life, he filled exactly this gap. That was the moment things started moving again.

A huge part of it. Beyond financial pressure, the main reason why I only decided relatively late to study fine art was that

An essential aspect of this is the relationship to mistakes. Only through the possibility of change do mistakes become bearable in the first place. A painting emerges through a permanent process of transition in which you are constantly trying to create balance and harmony. Through successful decisions, but also through mistakes.

Once you understand that mistakes do not need to disappear but can instead be integrated, an enormous sense of freedom opens up.

Being accepted into Gregor’s class fulfilled a lifelong dream for me. I finally found the right tools and the courage to encounter myself as an artist and confront what that term really meant for me.

Through the immense spaces of the Academy, I also realized how naturally comfortable and confident I felt working on a large scale. My diploma project, Aquarius, included a 3.70 Å~ 5 meter painting as well as two 2.40 Å~ 1.75 meter Plexiglas works. The response from the thousands of visitors during the diploma exhibition was incredible. I had the impression that the scale of the work created a kind of collective imagination in which we all participated.

When things are going particularly well creatively, an emerging pressure forces men to take a radical step that suddenly turns everything upside down.  A disturbing emptiness fills the room, and I feel like a complete beginner again.

For example, I am currently working on two paintings that carry a certain pressure. At the end of June, they will be shown in the group exhibition Empty Places, Crowded Hearts at Galerie Crone in Berlin alongside works by fantastic female artists such as Rosemarie Trockel, Hanne Darboven, Channa Horwitz, Charlotte Posenenske and Carola Dertnig.

Being able to exhibit alongside these artists, who have long been role models for me, fills me with a sense of respect that is incredibly motivating, but not always easy to navigate.

In moments like these, I transform my studio into a place of protection, almost like a cave in complete darkness.

Daily routines and avoiding alcohol and other drugs are my greatest forms of protection. In that way, my body can provide me every morning with the energy I need for the day ahead. It is therefore less about surrounding myself with a certain external energy and more about creating an inner state from which concentrated and open action becomes possible.

When I’m asleep. During sleep, you process so much that there is no way to be anything other than yourself.