Carolin Rechberg treats art like a lived experience, not a finished product. Born in Starnberg, Germany, she moves through creative fields with the ease of someone who never felt bound by category. Her practice spans ceramics, sculpture, painting, sound, performance, photography, writing, and installation—not as a list of skills, but as a way of staying connected to the world around her. Rechberg doesn’t aim to produce static objects. She’s more interested in what unfolds when material, body, space, and attention meet.
Her process is physical. Sensory. Rooted in rhythm and repetition. The way she works reflects how she sees: nothing is fixed, everything’s shifting. Her art is not about solving something or telling a story—it’s about making space to notice. Through movement, texture, and sound, she builds environments that ask you to slow down and feel. Three works show how this approach takes shape: Song of Myself, Karuna, and Genesis.
Song of Myself
Installation – Mixed Media – Site Specific (10 x 10 x 5 meters), 2015
This piece isn’t something you look at. It’s something you enter. Song of Myself is a structure designed to hold sound—and to be completed by it. Until a person walks in, speaks, or sings, it waits. It’s not just an artwork, it’s a space tuned to resonance. Once you step inside, you become part of the piece.
Rechberg created it as a kind of sculptural echo chamber—one where sound shapes the space as much as the structure shapes the sound. The title recalls Whitman, but the connection is intuitive, not literary. It’s a call to presence. You bring your voice, and the room listens. Then it responds.
What’s left behind is memory. Not of events, but of vibrations, of breath, of being there. The piece lingers even after the sound fades. It holds a record of presence, suspended in air and structure.
Karuna
Installation – Canvas, acrylic, oil paint, house paint, burlap, birch, pine, tracing paper, cord, text – (4 x 3 x 3 meters), 2011
Where Song of Myself invites voice, Karuna works in silence. Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s The Island, where birds call “attention” to ground people in the moment, Rechberg built a quiet space that does the same—without speaking.
You walk into a mix of raw textures—burlap, rough wood, paint, and fabric. It smells earthy, settled. The structure is open, but enclosed enough to feel like you’ve stepped into something. Paintings and materials hang softly. There’s a stillness here, but not an emptiness.
The Sanskrit word karuna means compassion. Rechberg translates that not into image, but into environment. It’s a physical place built to hold awareness. You might read the included text, or you might not. Either way, the space does the work. It gently holds your attention and reminds you that noticing itself can be a form of care.
Genesis
Painting – Mixed media on canvas – (183 x 456 cm), 2016
Rechberg returns to canvas here, but doesn’t confine herself to the traditional flat surface. Genesis reads like something in mid-transformation. It’s wide, physical, layered—part painting, part landscape. Materials build up and break apart across the expanse. It feels like motion caught in place.
The title suggests a beginning, but not a single moment. Instead, the piece feels like a continual unfolding. Color, shape, and texture shift across the surface. Nothing is framed or finalized. The painting feels alive, the way nature feels alive—always changing.
There’s no figure, no scene, no resolution. It’s not an image to decode, but a space to stay with. Rechberg paints not to illustrate, but to activate. This piece reflects her ongoing interest in origin—not as a past event, but as something always happening.
Each of these works carries the same invitation: slow down, notice what’s around you, and feel your way through it. Whether it’s through sound, space, or canvas, Rechberg creates openings rather than conclusions. Her materials shift from piece to piece, but her intention stays steady: presence over production, sensation over story.
She doesn’t push you toward meaning. She asks you to sit with the experience—whatever it might be. In a fast world full of quick images and explanations, Rechberg’s work offers an alternative. It doesn’t compete for attention. It holds space for it.
Her art isn’t there to be consumed. It’s there to be inhabited. To remind you, quietly and clearly, that being with something is enough.
