come closer is an invitation to enter the gallery and approach the artworks of José Gomes and Beate Höing. It is an invitation to explore the countless, intriguing details in the works of the two artists and to immerse yourself in their universe.

The "Kunstverein Münsterland Art Prize" was awarded for the first time in 2015 to honour above-average talents nationwide and to promote interesting perspectives and artistic developments and to introduce people in the region to positions in contemporary art. The award, which is highly endowed with €10,000, is presented every four years. José Gomes was awarded the ‘Kunstverein Münsterland Art Prize’ in 2023. His artistic work is characterised by the nature and cultures of his home country Brazil, the destructive actions of man in the paradox between dependence and destructive behaviour.
Gomes' work can currently be seen in FUKT #22 – Magazine for Drawing. The 22nd issue is entitled The Nature Issue and also features artists such as Cy Twombly and Wangechi Mutu.
"Creation and destruction, life and death - in this field of tension move the drawings of José Gomes (*1968 in Espírito Santo, Brazil, lives and works in Cologne). With a clear reference to Brazilian nature and culture, his works on paper are partly like collages, which develop a strong image depth. Gomes's research for his drawings also includes the study of drone images of Brazilian jungles, which make it very clear how these important habitats are destroyed. These insights as well as the examination of Brazilian art history and crafts flow into Gomes' filigree drawings, in which the figurative is often broken by abstract elements and thereby tells a very own story.“
Dr. Carla Cugini

Beate Höing (*1966, lives and works in Coesfeld) – inspired by the ornamental and the textural material used in the cultural-historical folk art of fairy tales and myths as well as of traditions and rituals - took up these influences in her painting and ceramic work. Out of them she has created her own autonomous iconography. Hereby already inherent,associated and recollected images come together in an ambivalent game of reality and fiction where dreams and nightmares, relief and dread lie side by side. Materiality and form are thus inseparably linked. Furthermore the artist’s oil paintings and ceramic sculptures, including her installations, tell of a passion for the beauty, the delicacy and the aesthetics of things as well as of a playful lust for all innate possibilities.
Beate Höing’s paintings present a world of images based on photographic sources from the 1970s and 80s. The intimacy of the moment is recorded piecemeal. A further work series depicts “headdresses”, also in oversized formats. The pictured motifs at first seem to be drawn from a cozy world or from a documentation of bygone days. This peaceful idyll is deceptive, however, and a second glance also reveals the world’s ambivalences and doublespeak.
All of which is likewise true for her ceramic works that, as an independent medium, are engaged in interaction with painting. The ceramic material indirectly calls up a suspicion of kitsch, but also of traditional craftsmanship. This “loan” counteracts the content-related statement that the artist almost provocatively intensifies. The incorporation of bric-a-brac and porcelain figures—for centuries the embodiment of bourgeois taste, loved as decorative itemsor souvenirs or dismissed as kitsch—offer adequate space for the imagination and the fantastic. Maidens and youths, fairy-tale and fabled creatures or animals asleep or dreaming: these fragile figures grow out of floral and opulent pedestal elements, stand on their own, present themselves in figural arrangements, or asroom-high, wall-filling installations.
Beate Höing’s works cast a very poetic, at times ironic, glance onto the past, tell of nostalgic memories, of dreams and surreal worlds, complete with a whimsical twinkle of her eye."
Jutta Meyer zu Riemsloh, M.A.