HfK master’s student Wiebke Mertens explores gestures in the context of female friendships

From 13 June to 13 September 2026, the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum (PMBM) will be exhibiting new paintings by Wiebke Mertens. The 28-year-old winner of the 2024 Paula Modersohn-Becker Young Artists’ Prize also won the Karin Hollweg Prize that same year as a master’s student at the HfK, which includes a solo exhibition in one of Bremen’s museums. “Wiebke Mertens – Main Character” is integrated, both spatially and thematically, into the retrospective “Becoming Paula” marking the 150th anniversary of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s birth, which also runs until 13 September.

Wiebke Mertens was awarded the Karin Hollweg Prize in 2024 for her work “Slim Fit”. In this multi-part work, she depicted body parts painted in oil on paper and presented in an installation-style hanging, creating connections and juxtapositions between the body parts. The figures, depicted in fragments, are thus engaged in an exchange, yet are simultaneously fragmented and isolated within their custom-tailored pictorial formats. The paintings play with the relationships and the potential for communication between the depicted bodies.

The current solo exhibition “Main Character” at the PMBM illustrates Wiebke Mertens’ artistic development since 2024: The artist deepens and expands upon the approach of the ‘Slim Fit’ series by bringing encounters and relationships into focus and examining gestures of self-expression, closeness or distancing, particularly in the context of friendships between women. In doing so, she seeks ways to depict the embodiment of closeness, support and care without disregarding inequalities and the associated dynamics of competition and power that can also be part of friendships. She addresses the urge to self-present – the desire to tell one’s own story – and the simultaneous need for genuine closeness. How do intimacy and solidarity arise? How does distance manifest itself in relation to oneself and others? With her striking focus on bodies and their presentation, the artist illuminates the various levels of connection.

Particularly striking are the presence of colour, which the painter achieves through her technique of painting in oil on paper, as well as the sometimes unusual formats that exaggerate body parts and emphasise sequences of movement. In doing so, the artist creates a hybrid pictorial style that breaks with the weightiness of the painted portrait, whilst at the same time impressing with its precise technique.

The exhibition comprises twelve new works, which are on display on the third floor of the museum – the so-called “Paula Modersohn-Becker Hall”. Links between these works and those of Paula Modersohn-Becker can be found in the radical self-questioning and uncompromising depiction of the human figure, as well as in the formal concentration and distillation of the pictorial content and formats to the essential. In conversation with the exhibition curator Henrike Hans, Wiebke Mertens described her personal relationship with Paula Modersohn-Becker as follows: “I’m a fan! The portrait that Paula Modersohn-Becker painted of Clara Rilke-Westhoff in particular influenced me during my studies, no doubt partly because of the friendship between the two.”

Her works are currently also on display in the Worpswede group exhibition “Impuls Paula”, which runs until 1 November 2026 at the Worpswede Museums.