Helene Appel was born in 1976 in Karlsruhe, Germany, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Her paintings on linen — of everyday objects such as netting, blankets, stitches and floor sweepings — explore the tension between faithful representation and the transformative possibilities in the process of painting. “Helene Appel exchanges her attention and labor for the specific and individual characteristics that her painted objects reveal over the time that she exposes herself to them,” writes Anna-Catharina Gebbers in the catalog accompanying the artist’s 2011 solo exhibition at the Mönchehaus Museum Goslar. “For every glance and brush stroke that she dedicates to her subject, she receives in exchange a further discovery of another of its particularities.”
