With the exhibition INTO COLD WATER, the Neue Kunsthaus Ahrenshoop highlights a network that has enabled artistic mobility and exchange between Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern for the past 20 years. The cooperation between the Kunststiftung Sachsen-Anhalt and the Künstlerhaus Lukas underscores the relevance of residency formats as productive spaces for temporary encounters, individual artistic processes, and interregional dialogue.

Three artistic positions – Franca Bartholomäi, Christiane Budig, and Sarah Schuschkleb – who worked at the Künstlerhaus Lukas as part of this grant program, enter into an open dialogue within the exhibition. Their works span printmaking, drawing, sculpture, as well as jewelry and object art, and explore questions of materiality, narration, and bodily reference.

Franca Bartholomäi (born 1975, residency at Künstlerhaus Lukas in 2009) works with woodcut and paper cutouts in a consistent black-and-white aesthetic. Her visual worlds emerge from elaborate manual processes and combine art historical references with contemporary themes. Female figures and animals often occupy the center of ambiguous scenes that oscillate between fairy tale, allegory, and contemporaneity. Through a dense layering of symbols, styles, and epochs, Bartholomäi creates precisely composed narrative spaces that intentionally leave room for interpretation.

Christiane Budig (born 1969, residency at Künstlerhaus Lukas in 2024) combines drawing, glass objects, and sculpture into works that arise from intense observation of nature—such as frottages of groyne heads on the Baltic Sea coast in Ahrenshoop. Her drawings translate real structures into imaginative visual worlds, where the familiar and the strange intertwine. Her glass works, such as Threshold (2024), also address transitions and tensions—between invitation and demarcation, between materiality and meaning. Budig's works create quiet spaces for contemplation and social reflection.

Sarah Schuschkleb (born 1985, residency at Künstlerhaus Lukas in 2020) works at the intersection of jewelry, small sculpture, and object art. Her pieces emerge in dialogue with the body—as carrier, resonance space, and counterpart. She does not see jewelry as mere accessory, but as a means of tactile experience and inner focus. Her works question the relationship between proximity and distance, between internal and external perception, between emotional charge and social behavior.

The exhibition INTO COLD WATER was supported by the Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt. Additional sponsors include the Ministry of Science, Culture, Federal and European Affairs of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the municipality and spa administration of Ahrenshoop, the district of Vorpommern-Rügen, the Sparkasse Vorpommern, and the friends’ association NEUE KUNST HAT FREUNDE.