Up Close – Goldrausch 2025 presents works by participants of the 35th edition of the renowned professional development and support program of the same name.
The exhibition shows current works by fifteen visual artists working in Berlin: surreal paintings and archival photographs that challenge our visual perception, while multimedia installations explore power structures and open up portals to other worlds. In research-based video works and drawings, temporality becomes tangible as a gesture of remembrance. What the diverse motifs and media have in common is that they take a look up close—at individual biographies, at social conditions, and at political struggles.
The Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt promotes the careers of FLINTA artists who are making outstanding contributions in the field. In 2025, the project is celebrating its 35th anniversary! Since 1989, the program has supported more than 500 women artists and created a unique network that fosters exchange, solidarity, professionalism, and visibility. Over the years, the final exhibitions have taken place in a wide variety of locations—from collectively run project spaces to public institutions like Gropius Bau.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of a catalogue featuring the works of each artist.
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In Aura Roig’s (*1994, Tortosa, Spain), oil paintings, humour is linked to central social themes such as gender, power and care. Roig thus creates a form of magical realism. The works, painted in glazed oil paint, range from series of small-format paintings to larger than life portraits: the paintings depict a world in which the everyday meets the unusual — sweating eggs, living vegetables, or enlarged body parts become surreal metaphors for personal experiences and socially assigned roles. In doing so, Roig plays with the supposed binary nature of gender and exaggerates it to the point of grotesqueness. In this way, the artificiality of the construct becomes visible, circumscribed, and opened up. In the painting The Explosion of the Volcano: a Drag King Painting, they combine bodybuilding and drag to create a new form of representation of gender strength that is at once grotesque, comical, and erotic. Traditional gender ideals are transformed, giving rise to diversity, resilience, and freedom. Vulnerability becomes visible in the images as a source of strength. Roig works intuitively, allowing emotions and autofictional experiences to flow into their pictorial motifs, thus inviting us to overcome established systems of order and create space for new perspectives.