Nina Stoelting

From May to July 2025, Nina Stoelting worked as an artist in residence at Künstlerhof Frohnau on her large-scale cycle The Art of Fugue – Work in Progress.

Since autumn 2023, she has been developing a series of large-format canvases inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s work of the same name. Each of the 14 Contrapunctus fugues is dedicated a painting, conceived in expression and gesture as an analogue to musical variation. While her earlier series Capriccio was devoted to the string quartets of Viennese Classicism through to late Romanticism, the new cycle opens up an entirely different formal field through its engagement with Baroque polyphony.

At its core remains the visualization of music. The painting process is preceded by conceptual reflection, yet while listening and working, Stoelting follows an intuitive, almost dance-like movement. Her “brushes” consist of carefully selected plants, whose structures transfer tonal color, rhythm, and expression onto the canvas. Layer by layer, synesthetic compositions emerge that translate sonic spaces into pictorial ones.