Art Cologne6.11.2025–9.11.2025Veronika Hilger, Anousha Payne, Boris Saccone, Jan Paul Evers
JO VAN DE LOO & Sperling | Collaborations | Art Cologne 2025
VERONIKA HILGER | ANOUSHA PAYNE (Sperling)
JAN PAUL EVERS | BORIS SACCONE (JO VAN DE LOO)
In the Anthropocene, uncertainty becomes both a condition and a language. This year’s Art Cologne Collaborations between Jo van de Loo and Sperling (Munich) brings together four artists – Veronika Hilger, Jan Paul Evers, Anousha Payne, and Boris Saccone – whose diverse practices probe this collective instability. Through layered pictorial realms, Hilger visualizes the porous boundaries between nature, self, and form. Evers investigates the shifting logics of photography in an age of algorithmic vision, challenging how we construct and consume reality. Payne’s hybrid drawings and paintings reflect on spiritual ambiguity, myth, and transformation, offering tactile meditations on materiality and identity. Saccone’s surreal figurations hover between real and imagined worlds, conjuring atmospheric states of emotional and environmental flux. In different media and approaches, each artist navigates a fractured landscape where clarity slips and meaning mutates. The exhibition becomes a porous zone – one of questions, thresholds, and flickering certainties – mirroring the unstable terrain of a world in ecological, technological, and existential upheaval.
Hall 11.2., B119
Preview (by invitation only): Thursday, 6 November 2025, 12:00 – 4:00 pm
Vernissage: Thursday, 6 November 2025, 4:00 – 8:00 pm
Opening hours:
Friday–Saturday, 7–8 November 2025, 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
Sunday, 9 November 2025, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
The artistic practice of Jan Paul Evers (*1982, Cologne) explores photography as a medium for reflecting on perception and the relationship to the world. In the spirit of Vilém Flusser, it is understood as a game against the apparatus—questioning established image logics and opening up new aesthetic possibilities. Through analog black-and-white techniques, experimental darkroom processes, and digital image appropriation, alternative methods of image production and transformation are tested. Furthermore, the use of artificial intelligence expands the engagement with the conditions of photographic image generation. Art historical references—particularly to Pop Art, Constructivism, and Abstract Art—serve as visual and conceptual spaces for reflection. In light of contemporary crises, the examination of imaging processes and their role in the construction of reality has gained increasing relevance.
Veronika Hilger’s (*1981, Prien am Chiemsee) paintings are located in an intermediate realm: between genres, classifications, and abstraction. They address classical subjects such as interiors, landscapes, still life and portraits. She does not separate these genres clearly from each other but rather fuses them into independent pictorial worlds of biomorphic forms that can be read as parables about the human relationship to nature and about the relationship of humans to each other. Ultimately, the oscillation, the as-well-as, and the in-between are what’s interesting to the artist. She explores fundamental questions about the nature and meaning of painting in its formal, technical and conceptual realization by arranging, shifting, layering and changing the pictorial elements in a spontaneous yet careful painting process.
Working in sculpture and painting, Anousha Payne’s (*1991, Southampton) preferred materials are ceramics, textiles, wood, rattan, metal, and watercolor. Her work explores the human pursuit of spirituality in object form, as a mode of cultural expression distinct from religious symbolism. Payne’s work processes the boundaries between personal experience, fiction, and myth; exploring how information is both lost and gained through the transition from drawing and painting to three-dimensional works, particularly ceramic sculpture. Often deploying reptile skin, her ceramics are intended as hybrid objects, a reminder of the fluidity and shared qualities between humans, animals, the natural world and inanimate objects. Ceramic sculptures are adorned with jewelry and textiles, acting as cultural signifiers while questioning material hierarchies and values. This process seeks to establish an aesthetic dialogue and personal visual language as a meditative interaction. Informed by Indian folk stories and personal fiction, she plays with ideas of the performative power of objects and chance, the combination of moral dilemmas and magic alongside characters with transformative qualities.
Boris Saccone (*1991, Schongau im Allgäu) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich in 2023, where he was “Meisterschüler” in the class of Gregor Hildebrandt. Using, among other materials, charcoal, pastel chalk, acrylic, oil and spray paint, Saccone creates uncanny yet enthralling paintings which blur the line between reality and transcendence. He remains consistently attached to figurative themes but combines them with an innovative, abstract twist, experimenting with flat, stylized surfaces, abstraction and planar constructions which deny our access at the same time as they draw us in. A similar paradox is true for Saccone’s use of color: It is likely not despite of but precisely because of their predominantly cool pastel tones – contrasted with almost cartoon-like black outlines – that the paintings urge us to linger and contemplate on their enigmatic motifs and the atmospheric visual spaces.
