Landscape in Motion
Painting and Works on Paper by Heike Negenborn
6 March – 18 April 2026, Opening: 5 March, 6-9 p.m.

Heike Negenborn’s meticulously painted landscapes reveal, on closer inspection, a striking complexity. They are not realistic depictions of nature, but carefully constructed realities. The artist combines her direct experience of specific landscapes with skies drawn from her self-created cloud archive or, as in the series “Correspondences”, with skies borrowed from the history of art. Under the title “Landscape in Motion”, Galerie Poll is presenting – for the third time – paintings and works on paper by one of today’s most distinctive landscape artists. Negenborn’s panoramas, marked by low horizons and at times dramatic cloud formations, consciously evoke seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, yet they are reimagined based on close studies from nature.

In her work, the artist examines the relationship between human beings and nature. She is particularly concerned with the increasing appropriation of analogue reality by digital images and the resulting transformation of perception. Her practice is grounded in landscape studies conducted in Germany, France, Spain, and other countries. At the same time, she draws inspiration from the history of art.

Negenborn engages with landscape through a unique process: she surveys trees, fields, and mountains and translates this data into perspectivally constructed pictorial spaces. Using photographs and drawings, she develops new viewpoints and digitally sharpens her compositions. Nature emerges not as a mere depiction, but as an intentionally shaped space defined by lines, scale, and perspective. This is the basis for her paintings in acrylic on canvas or wood; drawings and prints are integral to the creative process.

Over time, Negenborn has developed several artistic approaches to landscape, articulated in her ongoing series “Terra Cognita – Landscape in Transition” (since 2021), “Mountains and Rocks” (since 2022), “Netscapes – Landscape in Transition” (since 2014), “Correspondences” (since 2024), and “Cloud Pieces” (since 2026).

The survey exhibition “Fields of Sight – Landscape as Space for Thought” at the Städtische Galerie Speyer in 2025 highlighted the coherence and complexity of Negenborn’s engagement with landscape across more than two decades. The presentation at Galerie Poll now centres on paintings and works on paper produced within the past four years.

Heike Negenborn, born in 1964 in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, studied painting, design, and ceramics in the United States at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, and at Austin College in Sherman Texas, and painting and printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts Mainz under Prof. Peter Lörincz. Based in Windesheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, she has been honoured with numerous scholarships and awards for her artistic work. In 2018 she received the prestigious Palatinate Prize for Fine Arts awarded by the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, and in 2016 she was presented with the Wilhelm Morgner Prize for Painting of the Museum Wilhelm Morgner Soest. She most recently received the Ike and Berthold-Roland-Stiftung Art Prize in 2024. Works by the artist are held in numerous public and private collections in Germany, Japan, Canada, and the United States.