Salomé Berger

Before she ever picked up a brush, Salomé Berger learned to move and that early discipline in dance still runs through everything she paints.

Her work circles around the body, not as a fixed subject to be rendered, but as something perpetually in motion, caught between recognition and dissolution.

Her paintings resist theatrical staging. Rather than presenting the body as a finished image, Berger strips it of pose and performance, redirecting attention toward the underlying dynamics. The pull and tension that shape a figure before it can be fixed in place.

Working from collage, she fuses fragments of bodies with plant forms, landscape, and organic matter, building pictorial worlds that feel at once familiar and faintly surreal. Spaces that drift between the paradisiacal and the dystopian, alternately loosening and condensing.
The canvas becomes an intimate stage where everything follows its own internal rhythm, suspended between naturalism and synthesis. The result is work that hovers between figuration and abstraction, never quite settling into either, treating stability itself as something to be questioned rather than assumed.

Berger studied at the University of Fine Arts Münster under Prof. Cornelius Völker, becoming his master student in 2022.
Her work has been recognized with a DAAD graduation fellowship, a travel grant, and artist-in-residence fellowships at Kunstverein Duisburg and Werkstatt Altena e.V.; in 2025 she was shortlisted for the Ida Gerhardi Förderpreis.
She has held solo exhibitions including at Kunstverein Greven (2023) and Galerie Troner, Düsseldorf (2026), and has shown in group exhibitions at Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle Münster, Forum Kunst Rottweil, Hismoon Gallery (China), and Galerie Peter Gaugy (Brussels), among others.
She lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Photo credits: Jana Buch, JMR-Dokumentation, Torsten Schimmer, Teresa Karst