Beate Sonnenberg
Flow 10, 2020

This is a deep exploration into the realms of materials, space, form, and color, seeking to unravel the intricacies of their recognition and perception.

Beate’s work is defined by her beautiful and exquisite lighting skills. She has the ability to turn mundane objects into pieces that awaken curiosity and desire through the elaborate play of light and shadow. Her attitude towards work is playful, passionate, and open, whether for commercial assignments or a personal art project. She is always keen to explore new ideas, aiming to create a modern classic with an edge, as well as a timeless masterpieces.

Born and raised in Germany, Beate moved in 1992 to study photography at the Bournemouth College of Art & Design in the UK. After graduating, she went traveling and settled for six years in Mexico City where she honed her photography skills and met her future husband, also a photographer. Now they divide their time between London and New York.

In her art practice Beate is interested in how space, form and color are recognised and how it manipulates perception. She creates her own installations and spaces, occupying these with shapes and materials that create a tension between the geometric and the organic, the sleek and the hand-made, and looking at how we see and perceive space through abstraction and materiality. She is deeply interested in the physicality of light, how it interacts with materials and relates to space. She experiments with perspective, illusion and the configuration of geometric forms, taking the three dimensions into the two dimensions. She aims to question how we look and perceive, and how space can be used, appropriated and revealed.

She is very much influenced by the abstract art movement from the early part of the 20th century and has a fascination for the concept of developing a form of expression that moves from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access ‘the supremacy of pure feeling’ and spirituality. By investigating materiality and space through recording her installations with photography and video, she is looking to access this. Abstraction becomes the guide to understanding for her.