Nicole Wendel

The drawings from the series Notation of Time explicitly engage with the phenomena of time and temporality. Their originating impulses are informed by observations inspired by philosophical texts, corporeality, rhythm, and various poetic traditions. In this exploration, time is examined in poetic and philosophical terms as a form of spatial notation. These conceptual impulses are also reflected in the titles, and each is inscribed on the reverse of the drawings.

Nicole Wendel’s work operates at the intersection of drawing, choreography, and performance. Her artistic approach embodies an expanded, process-oriented concept of drawing, shaped by bodily movement, emotional impulses, phenomenological inquiry, and literary-textual sources. Grounded in a sensitive observation of the body within its sociological, psychological, and physical contexts, her artistic research focuses both on interpersonal space as a site of communication and relationship, and on specific locations shaped by inherent movement and the accumulation of history.

Her graphic language ranges from concrete abstraction—manifested through direct traces and gestures—to tonal-rhythmic formulations, space-modulating structures, and poetically diagrammatic articulations.

Nicole Wendel is, alongside the artists Emma Cocker and Alex Arteaga, co-researcher in the project Thinking Æsthetic Thinking through Aethetic Research Practices, initiated by Alex Arteaga. Emma Cocker and Nicole Wendel also share their practices, in the fields of language and drawing, within an Ecology of Relation _ The Appearance of the More, a term used for describing a form of live practising together – or of being-in-touch – through which Cocker and Wendel explore ways for bringing-into-relation the unfolding and embodied processes of drawing and languaging as sensitive fields of perception and cooperation.Together with choreographer and dancer Jan Burkhardt, she co-founded the group (N)ON SITE BODIES, which focuses on developing new performative formats in eco-psychological and site-specific contexts. Her multimedia works have been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, both nationally—such as KAI10 Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg—and internationally, including the Liu Haisu Museum in Shanghai. Her works are held in public collections including the Berlinische Galerie, the Hegenbarth Collection Berlin, and the collection of the German Federal Foreign Office at the Residence of the German Embassy in Tokyo, Japan and Austria.