Nina Wehrle & Jeroen Geel
Nina Wehrle & Jeroen Geel – Atelier X Residency
As part of the Atelier X program of the Koechlin Foundation, Nina Wehrle and Jeroen Geel spent five months at Künstlerhof Frohnau together with their two children. They used the residency as both an artistic and a familial experiment:
“The everyday madness of family life, the wonder of childhood, the power of imagination, the bursting life of the forest, and the echo of the metropolis – all of these are impulses for drawings, paintings, and visual narratives that we capture during our time in the studio residency.”
Their shared stay enabled both artists to move beyond familiar formats and explore the interplay between family life and artistic practice. Their drawings, paintings, and visual narratives reflect not only individual artistic signatures, but also a dialogical process in which everyday life and nature, sound and silence, interior and exterior spaces resonate with one another.
Nina Wehrle (born 1984, Switzerland) is an illustrator, runs the studio It’s Raining Elephants, and also creates ceramics under the label HOI. She teaches at HSLU Design Film Art in Lucerne. During her stay in Frohnau, she integrated design elements of everyday life and family dynamics into her work, expanded her narrative forms, and created visual stories that oscillate between intimacy, nature, and urban resonance.
Jeroen Geel (born 1976, Switzerland) is a painter, object artist, and teacher of visual arts at Gymnasium Lucerne. In recent bodies of work, he has experimented with stucco marble panels that appear like abstract paintings from a distance. In Frohnau, he related his painting practice to the surroundings of the Künstlerhof and the forest, weaving familial influences and spatial impressions into figurative and landscape motifs.