"654 Grams_TheExhausted" Painting

Friederike Biebl (born 1976 in Medellín, Colombia) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Drawing, painting, image objects, and what Biebl calls “Materials” or “Qualities” form the core of her artistic practice. Her work investigates human experience at the intersection of philosophy, memory studies, body research, and material aesthetics. It explores the invisible forces shaping perception, identity, and collective experience, and the traces they leave within bodies, objects, and images. Her intellectual foundation was shaped by studies in philosophy at the University of Freiburg, particularly through engagements with Hegel, Simone Weil, Foucault, and Deleuze. These influences fostered a lasting interest in memory, perception, subject formation, and the construction of reality. She also developed a strong connection to the work of Eva Hesse and Maria Lassnig. Early on, her attention turned toward hidden wounds, fractures of experience, and the fragility of seemingly stable identities. Musical and performative experiences likewise influenced her artistic approach. Violin studies with Katja Schill and vocal training with Verena Vogts opened a path toward questions of resonance, embodiment, and presence. Her interest in performance, language, and the figure of the clown found expression in the Hack Performance, presented within Paul M. Waschkau’s ARTAUDresearch project at Acker Stadt Palast, Berlin (2014). Between 2006 and 2009, Biebl was part of the leadership team of the independent Berlin theatre company theaterkapelle99. During this period, she collaborated with curator Harm Lux on El Quinto Pasajero in La Paz, Bolivia, and with theatre scholar Dr. Frank Raddatz on City of Dreams, based on texts by Etel Adnan and Heiner Müller, which premiered at Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf in 2010. Her engagement with cultural production also led her to postgraduate studies in cultural management. Since 2009, Biebl has developed her visual work as the primary medium of her artistic research. She describes this investigation as an “Archaeology of Existence/Presence.” The body appears as an archive in which biographical, familial, and social processes are inscribed. Memory, care, loss, fear, exhaustion, and collective experiences of crisis are translated into material, form, and image. The image functions not as a representation of reality but as its excavation site. Drawings, paintings, and image objects become spaces in which the invisible acquires material form.