anhedonia II

In the organizer's words:

Lea Gocht anhedonia II Art Prize of the Werner Stober Foundation

Since 2024, the artist Lea Gocht has been working on an ongoing installation series entitled "anhedonia". Following the exhibition at Galerie Brutal in Hanover, she is continuing the series at the SGK. The term anhedonia comes from clinical psychology and refers to the loss of feeling joy. Based on her own critical perspective as a person read as female, Lea Gocht extends the term to collective feelings such as powerlessness, loss of control or the search for agency, which arise in response to social crises.

While anhedonia I focused on the effects of man-made climate change, anhedonia II sheds light on the psychological burdens of the individual in a current state of multiple crises. To this end, she has transformed the museum's project space into a surreal scenario that is located somewhere between pleasurable utopia and subliminal dystopia. Piled up foam mattresses on a floor composed of countless photographs of different street surfaces form the refuge of fabric cats. They were sewn together from several patterns showing photographic fragments of a female body. The resulting hybrid creatures of human and animal are as grotesque as they are humorous and encourage reflection on different perceptions of corporeality. The impression of an apocalyptic landscape is reinforced by the storage barrels and cans of chickpeas, which evoke associations with social phenomena such as disaster preparedness, also a response to actual or imagined crisis situations.

With her exhibition, Lea Gocht spreads out a multi-layered panorama that resembles a stage set. The structure of her installation takes up the composition of the well-known painting "The Sea of Ice" by the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. The fictitious sea is replaced here by the street, which in turn alludes to the sealed floors in cities in the form of the impermeable photographic carpet. Exposed to this are not only the living creatures of the cats, but also the mattresses, actually the epitome of a private retreat.in her exhibition "anhedonia II", the artist Lea Gocht (*1995 in
Weingarten) transforms the project space of the Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe into a walk-in
collage full of absurd spatial experiences.

About the artist

Lea Gocht (*1995 in Weingarten) studied from 2013 to 2020 at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe under Toon Verhoef, Kalin Lindena and Corinne Wasmuht, whose master student she became in 2021. In 2019, she received the graduate scholarship from the state of Baden-Württemberg, in 2023 the scholarship from the Schöppingen Artists' Village Foundation and finally in 2024 the Werner Stober Foundation Art Prize. In the same year, she was also selected for the prestigious residency scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.