Astrid Köppe is a German artist who explores the beauty of unknown and mysterious shapes through her detailed drawings of abstract forms. Köppe produces a cognitive dissonance in her viewers by complicating both the identification of the object as well as the aesthetic aspects of the work. She enjoys playing with the boundary of the beautiful and exploring the concept of the distasteful. Her drawings often depict shapes that are impossible to classify or name. Plant, animal, mineral, or some strange hybridized combination of these, each work defies classification.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, KÖPPE, A TRAINED PAINTER, GREW FRUSTRATED WITH THE FORCED LAYERING OF OIL PAINTING, WHERE EVERY COMPOSITION FELT REQUIRED TO INCORPORATE A FOREGROUND AND BACKGROUND. HER DRAWINGS WERE ACCEPTED AS THEY WERE-PRECISE RENDERINGS IN MIXED MEDIA (GRAPHITE, WATERCOLOR, PEN AND INK, COLORED PENCIL AND PASTEL) OCCUPY THE CENTER OF A EUROPEAN STANDARD A4 SIZE WHITE SHEET OF DRAWING PAPER. BUT WITH PAINTINGS, SHE WAS CONSTANTLY CHALLENGED - CRITICS WANTED TO KNOW WHY SHE HAD "FORGOTTEN" TO PAINT THE BACKGROUND. IN ORDER TO RECREATE HER PREFERRED COMPOSITION, A SUBJECT ON A WHITE PLANE, IN A LARGER SCALE AND ON MEDIA OTHER THAN PAPER, SHE TURNED TO EXPERIMENTATION. RESEARCHING ALTERNATIVE PROCESSES, KÖPPE ULTIMATELY DISCOVERED THE PROCESS OF VITREOUS ENAMEL ON STEEL, WHICH DATES BACK TO THE FIRST CENTURY CE AND WAS UTILIZED BY THE EGYPTIANS AND THE ROMANS.

WITH VITREOUS ENAMEL, KÖPPE COULD ACHIEVE BOTH THE LARGER SCALE SHE SOUGHT, AND PUSH THE MEDIUM TO COMPLETELY NEW HEIGHTS. ACCORDING TO KÖPPE, WORKING WITH THE LUMINOUS GLASS COLORS AND TEXTURES OF VITREOUS ENAMEL WORK FELT AS THOUGH "WE FOUND EACH OTHER - EVERYTHING JUST WORKED." SHE WAS ABLE TO CREATE HER SIGNATURE BIOMORPHIC SHAPES IN UNIQUE COLORS AND TEXTURES ON THE FLAT WHITE PLANE SHE SEES IN HER MIND'S EYE. ULTIMATELY, IN HER WORDS, WITH BOTH HER DRAWINGS AND ENAMELS, THE ARTIST IS SEEKING "THE BALANCE BETWEEN THE PRECISION OF THE RENDERING AND THE OPENNESS OF INTERPRETATION."

Köppe’s artwork is inspired by landscapes, animals, or objects that she has seen; however, the goal is always this openness. In Köppe’s creations, one never knows quite what they are looking at. The compositions she finds the most satisfying are those that are “settled and unsettled at the same time.” While Köppe was at a residency in South Korea in 2011, the region experienced a severe monsoon that covered the area in a mold. Torn between disgust and fascination, Köppe found the textures and patterns growing all around her too exciting to ignore. This experience profoundly affected her art and inspired her to blur the definition of aesthetically pleasing objects. Often there are hair and mold-like protrusions in her drawings that force the viewer to reconcile society’s definition of unrefined or gross qualities with the artistic shape before them. Köppe’s technical perfection creates an illusion in the viewer’s mind that the unique image in front of them exists in our universe. Her drawings are reminiscent of detailed illustrations in biology textbooks and provoke the viewer to create a novel taxonomy of her mysterious forms. It is this struggle to rationalize the unfamiliar that engages us with Köppe’s work and asks us to reflect on our conception of unusual shapes.