guest gallery
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X STORAGE
Lindenstrasse 19, 50674 Cologne, Germany
Galerie Norbert Arns
opening hours/
Tuesday - Friday 12pm - 6pm, Saturday 12pm - 4pm
contact/
+49 151 65108248
director/
Norbert Arns
founded in/
2017 in Cologne
The gallery was founded in 2017 and since then is presenting contemporary artists of strong individual positions coming from visual art, design or poetry. As Norbert Arns himself used to make art and worked for Gerhard Richter for over 20 years before opening his space, he knows about the importance of a close relationship between gallery and artist. This focus on personal interaction leads to installations on-site and - together with texts written by poets or philosophers - gives the audience the opportunity to experience art in its original sense.
Facing the first gallery house of Cologne from the late 1960s, Galerie Norbert Arns is located in a midtown space, which used to host different galleries since the 1980s - and is connecting this breeze of tradition with new ways of presenting artists and their work to the public.
Courtesy Gallery Norbert Arns, Cologne
the work/
Celia’s Studio, London, 2019
"This photograph was taken in the studio of the British painter Celia Paul on a misty afternoon in March 2019. It was the first time I had visited and her paintings, which I knew so well, were suddenly present again in the space, in the smell of the paint left behind and that unmistakable, diffused light.
I have only ever photographed the studios of female painters and there is a particular, quiet and focused interiority to such places - an interiority which also drives my own photography so intensely. All my work is shot on film and I am drawn to analogue photography due to its privacy, holding on to what I may or may not have caught within a room that given day.
Beyond the frame of this photograph, taken in Celia’s bedroom, is a tall window which overlooks the British Museum. The sounds of the museum’s endless traffic do not quite break the stillness of the rooms above but instead amplify their focus on the act of painting within."
the artist/
Isabelle Young
I was born in 1989 in London, UK, where I currently live and work.
Perspective as a ‘particular way of regarding something’ is central to my work which is deeply influenced by literature and my fascination with the history of perspective within art and architecture. As a photographer, I see the way I do because of a certain novel and because of the poet Philip Larkin’s observation that ‘sun destroys / The interest of what’s happening in the shade’.
My family’s history has zig-zagged between Italy and England since the late-1800s and, although I have lived in London for my entire life, going to Italy is an act of return where I continually find the foundation to my identity as an artist.
Currently I am studying for an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art, London. Recent exhibitions include Work in Progress Show, Royal College of Art (2020); Involving Ourselves: Dolly Brown, Rivkah Gevinson, Ruby Squires, Isabelle Young, Galerie Norbert Arns, Cologne, Germany (2019) curated by Isabelle Young; and Overhaul, Peckham 24 Photography Festival, London (2018).