Vivian Greven, Aer III, 2021
, Oil on canvas, 80 × 58 cm
Kollitsch Collection

Poignantly and elegantly, two hands appear to be suspended in space, and yet manage to touch the delicately suggested, faceless body in a tender gesture. Using the canvas as the perfect medium for tactile perception, the artist’s works show precisely painted bodies and body parts in tender intimacy. The use of pastels further enhances the sense of delicacy and aesthetics that pervades her pictures, in which touch and contact are recurring themes, inviting the viewer to experience them in a way that goes beyond seeing.

— Magdalena Koschat

Vivian Greven, Mari, 2022
, Oil on canvas, 150 × 220 cm
Kollitsch Collection

“Vivian Greven’s painting is based on an adept play with various notion of bodies, being and representation, with concepts of classical antiquity merging with pop art and digital image worlds. Vivian Greven’s painting is characteristic of our present times, which are shaped by the internet and social media and thus dissolve the hierarchies between original, reproduction and simulation. The art historical and contemporary historical nestling corresponds with Greven’s painterly treatment of surfaces. Parts of her painting rise as actual reliefs that encounter sprayed or painted fictions of bodies and space. The aesthetic of her pictures vacillates between the vocabulary of physical painting and the ethereal illusion of LCD windows.”

— Kadel Willborn