Contemporary Artist Nina Groth

Artist Statement

My life had fallen out of balance. Plans, hopes, certainties — all began to dissolve. A separation changes everything. I flew to Barcelona. Not to find something new, but to feel grounded again. I was searching for a place where I could sort myself out. Somewhere between street festivals, Gaudí’s organic architecture, and my own emotional paralysis, I slowly began to wake from my numbness. I bought paints and started to paint. Layer by layer. Decision by decision.

And suddenly, I remembered an image: a roundabout in Mumbai. People, animals, vehicles — everything seemed on the verge of collision. And yet, for brief moments, order emerged again and again. A temporary balance that dissolved instantly and constantly reshaped itself. Back then, I had only observed it. Now I understood — and felt — what it truly meant. Stability is never fixed. It is created within the process, over and over again.

Painting became the place where I experience exactly that: arranging and rejecting, building and destroying, shifting and redefining. A space in which I decide freely — without rules, without correction. I paint to make this fragile interplay visible: those fleeting moments in which the world is balanced for just an instant.

I find these very dynamics reflected in cities. To me, cities are systems of simultaneity: order and chaos, structure and impulse, overview and detail. Everything exists in parallel. That is where my work begins. I paint cities. I work with them. From this emerge abstract-figurative urban landscapes with strong spatial depth and layered pictorial structures. The resulting condensed and fragmented image spaces do not depict specific places, but rather autonomous urban constructions.

I work with a palette knife in layers of acrylic, spray paint, and bitumen on canvas. Central perspective serves as a structural foundation that I deliberately disrupt through gestural interventions, scribbles, scratches, fragments, and overlapping layers. Precise lines meet open surfaces; the smallest details encounter the larger whole.

Within the process, different possible balances between structure and impulse emerge. My paintings capture a moment that could just as easily have become another. I decide which moment endures. What remains is the experience that stability is always possible again. That is where its potential lies: strengthening trust in change and embracing the transformations of life.

My vision: Within my paintings, temporary balances emerge through the interplay between the larger whole and the smallest detail. Through this, I aim to strengthen trust in change and personal development.