Inauguration of the gallery “Pas De Deux”

L’Est Républicain, Friday 30th December 2011 – Marcel Bresson

A jewelry box for the Arts

“Pas de Deux”, this name Gesa Emde and Mirko Krizanovic selected for their new art gallery, which they opened at their home in St Colomban, only a few hundred meters far from the chapel of the same name.

“Both of us are constantly on the move to complete the restoration of our house in order to create new works, thereby inspiring and complementing each other,” said Gesa who lives there with her husband for over 11 years, on and off, because of the roundtrips, back and forth to Germany.

In these old barn walls in Sainte Marie-en-Chanois Mirko has hung on one wall, his photographs, his portraits, his snapshots …

As a photojournalist, he has traveled the world on behalf of German newspapers. Seen through his lens, he summarizes the history, the people of a country. The prints, their compositions, combine the cold reality of a revolution of Romania, a unique view of New York from the vanished Twin Towers, or the soldiers in Afghanistan in three-dimensional space, led by GPS. The portrait of the Dalai Lama, the photos of the volunteers of Doctors Without Borders, or the children of Africa in the streets, convey reality, marked by Mirko’s view.

On the other wall, there is the tenderness, the inspiration of Gesa, expressed through the colors of her watercolor paintings, the black and white of her ink drawings or her etchings. From a few tracks of the graphic compositions, emerge a bird on the straw bales, a rainy day, a convoy of prisoners lined up like pylons, or, more prosaically, the sunken central of Fukushima. Here Gesa reacts sensitively to her environment, or she draws her inspiration from the photographs of Mirko.

In their house, the historic site, Gesa and Mirko bring the world closer to us, more of this cosmopolitanism, gaining reality, through the lens, the chalk or paint brush.

Open to the world
By creating the gallery in this lonely, but peaceful site, it also means an opening to the world. “We would also like to provide some space for other artists, to exhibit their work in our gallery, allowing encounters of our German artist friends with local artists, and to communicate our experiences within workshops, in conjunction with the accommodation of our guest rooms,” says Gesa .

If you regard the current problems in finding a European identity on the economic level – we, in our region of the Southern Vosges Mountains, have it already implemented on the cultural level.

The Art Gallery of Gesa and Mirko “Pas de Deux” is situated on the road to
the chapel of St. Colomban, on the heights of the town of Sainte Marie-en-Chanois.

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