Born 2002 in Viersen, Germany.
working and living in Düsseldorf, Germany.
since 2020
studying at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the Class of Prof. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.
since 2024
Meisterschülerin of Prof. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.
„Hannah Nelsen was born in 2002 in Dülken, a small town in the Lower Rhine region of western Germany.
Until she was twelve years old she lived with her parents in a fundamental evangelical free church. The experiences she made in this very devout community shaped her very much. Early on she came into contact with one of her great passions - botany. On the one hand because of her parents' great love of gardening, and on the other hand through her grandmother, who worked full-time as a florist. Driven by growing vacancy and the feeling of lack of perspective in her hometown, she then as a teenager began to be more and more interested in politics. As a result, at the age of sixteen, she and five friends of the same age founded a youth club with the goal of creating a place for the young people of her town to develop musically, artistically and politically, and to offer a place for free development. As a result, they organized all kinds of workshops, panel discussions, lectures and actions.
After graduating from school, she began her studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in October 2020 in the class of Professor Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Since then, her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions.
Nelsen works with many different media such as painting, installation, and most recently sound. However, she is particularly known for her garish, jungle-like plant motifs.
The landscapes that open up to the viewer never represent a real place, but rather arrangements that are not to be trusted too much. What appears to us at first glance like a tropical forest is much more a collection of carefully curated plants, sometimes more abstract, sometimes more naturalistically depicted. Again and again, allusions to Christian iconography can be found in her works; she takes up the stories she was taught as a child and questions the values behind them, placing them in new contexts.
Nelsen is particularly interested in the question of a nature in times of the Anthropocene, and what our definition of nature is in general.“
- N. Beitelsmann
cultural mediator , author
+49 176 50318377
hannah.nelsen@gmx.de