Ana Daniela Koch
Ana Daniela Koch’s primary medium is photography which she combines with painting and other mixed media techniques to realise the very essence of the sensual moment.
The artist uses light in stark contrast and occasional blending colour to highlight the dramatic prominence of the sense she is drawing the viewer into.
Ana Daniela Koch is driven by sense and feeling, her works providing focal access to depths of the human soul and psyche. Through her captivating photography and mixed media assemblages, Koch invites the viewer into the inner world, whereupon entering you understand the expansive and integral tension which binds humans to their senses, nature to balance and us to one another.
Koch’s works embody this connection. The artist’s Meraki series derives inspiration from its namesake. In Greek, ‘Meraki’ means to do something with soul, creativity or love – when you put “something of yourself” into what you are doing. Each work of the series explores one of the five senses, the overlaying of images of the body with gestural paint strokes, as the artist extracts the concentrated power of each through her layering of textural painting, adding something in “meraki.”
Light interplays with shadow and colour with texture, creating a concentrated nexus, where beauty, melancholy, flesh and spirit, motion and stillness, feeling and sublime nothingness are held together in equilibrium epitomised in works titled Psithurism, describing in Greek “the rustling of leaves in the wind”: the sublime moment heard, felt, seen and concretised forever in light and shape of a delicate, golden winged leaf, held suspended in darkness.
The senses are the membrane through which we experience the world and yet to have sense is predicated by its necessary absence. The artist’s works titled Ticket to the Moon are concerned with the interplay of lightness and heaviness in the human condition. She uses a dynamic layering of different sections of black and white photographs together with paint as an abstracted, nonverbal tool of communication, as instinctive as light itself, to describe the unconscious duality of life, living and feeling. Intertwining these forces through a transcendental eye seeing through the lens of her camera, Koch makes tangible the unobtainable imminence of experience.
Text by Constance Chester
In Greek, ‘Meraki’ means to do something with soul, creativity or love – when you put “something of yourself” into what you are doing.
Biography Ana Daniela Koch
born 1992 in Munich, Germany
Education
since 2017 Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Germany / Painting and Graphics, Class Prof. Gregor Hildebrandt
Exhibitions (selection)
2021
Supermarkt Frische Lieferung, Group Show, Rewe Premium Munich, Germany
Blick zurück nach vorn, Galerie Klüser, Munich, Germany
2020
Pandamic Edition, Annual Exhibition Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Class Gregor Hildebrandt, MUCCA, Munich, German
Der River, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig, Germany
2019
Annual Exhibition Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Germany
2018
Annual Exhibition Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Germany
Wir schwimmen alle im selben Wasser, Class Gregor Hildebrandt, Pasinger Fabrik München, Munich, Germany
2017
Annual Exhibition Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Germany
Works by Ana Daniela Koch
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Fall
2020 / Painting and photography on primed cotton on pdf plate on wooden frame / 70 x 50 cm / 27.6 x 19.7 in
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Woman sitting on the cliffs
2021 / Mixed media on wooden canvas / 50 x 40 cm / 19.7 x 15.7 in
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Ticket to the Moon
2017/2018 / Inkjetprint / each 50 x 40 cm / 19.7 x 15.7 in (framed)
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Psithurism
2018 / Photography / 40 x 30 cm / 15.7 x 11.8 in (framed)
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On the Roof of 44
2020 / Analog photography / 100 x 70 cm / 39.4 x 27.6 in (framed)
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Meraki Schmecken
2019/2020 / Photography, acrylic on paper / 40 x 30 cm / 15.7 x 11.8 in (framed)
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Meraki Hören
2019/2020 / Photography, acrylic on paper / 40 x 30 cm / 15.7 x 11.8 in (framed)
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Meraki Riechen
2019/2020 / Photography, acrylic on paper / 40 x 30 cm / 15.7 x 11.8 in (framed)
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Meraki Sehen
2019/2020 / Photography, acrylic on paper / 40 x 30 cm / 15.7 x 11.8 in (framed)
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Meraki Fühlen
2019/2020 / Photography, acrylic on paper / 40 x 30 cm / 15.7 x 11.8 in (framed)
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Cold Hands
2018 / Photography / 40 x 30 cm / 15.7 x 11.8 in (framed)