Elfen
From 07/10/2025
Openening 07/09/2024, 7:00 PM
Following Absolute Beginner, Zweiter Streich, Dreierlei, Quattro Stagioni, Fünf Sterne, Sechs Richtige, Das verflixte 7. Jahr, After Eight, Neun Neue Räume and X mark the Spot, Elfen is the eleventh exhibition in the Fürstenberg Zeitgenössisch series—playfully alluding to the symbolic and cultural multiplicity of the number eleven. In both art history and popular belief, eleven is regarded as a number of in-betweenhood, of transgression and the breakdown of rigid orders—a resonant space in which fine shifts, subtle transformations, and new modes of perception can emerge.
The group exhibition Elfen, held in the Princely Fürstenberg Collections in Donaueschingen, brings together three former fellows—Adriano Costa, Constantin Nitsche, and Mara Wohnhaas—whose practices exemplify the diversity and independence of contemporary positions. Each of their works circles, in its own individual way, around questions of materiality, visual language, and spatiality—balancing deadpan humor, sensual precision, and conceptual reflection. Elfen invites close scrutiny and warns against being deceived by apparent lightness—because within its formal delicacy lies a deeper, often critical engagement with the present and with perception.
Adriano Costa (*1975, São Paulo) moves effortlessly between high culture and everyday life. From used textiles, found objects, and discarded materials he constructs sculptural assemblages whose poetic and subversive power is often unlocked through their titles. Costa employs the language of sculpture to rethink questions of cultural coding and artistic value. His works consciously resist elitist notions of art, creating a rich field of tension between appropriation, memory, and shifted contexts. Costa’s pieces have been shown at, among others, the Kölnischer Kunstverein (wetANDsomeOLDstuffVANDALIZEDbyTHEartist, 2018) and Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo, Brussels, and New York. They belong to prestigious collections such as the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Currently his work is on view at Emalin, London, UK (ax-d. us. t, 2025), and from September it will be presented at Pivô, São Paulo.
Constantin Nitsche (*1987, Ludwigshafen) develops a painting practice that draws the mysterious from the familiar. His visual worlds oscillate between concrete situations and abstract structures, where atmosphere, memory, and formal reduction enter into a fragile equilibrium. Through his sensitive colorism and play with pictorial voids, he creates spaces that seem unbound by time and place. Nitsche lives and works in Marseille. His recent solo exhibitions include Blauregen (2022, La Traverse, Marseille), VIOLETTE (2021, O-Town House, Los Angeles), Oranges et Lavande (2023, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels), and Valse des Fleurs (2025, Collection Lambert, Avignon). Rooted in European painting traditions, his work simultaneously forges an introspective visual language that refocuses the gaze on the seemingly banal.
Mara Wohnhaas (*1997, Karlsruhe) practices across media—installations, performative readings, filmic and photographic works, as well as sculptural elements—all arranged into incisive constellations. She conceives staging through language, often linking text and object in enigmatic ways. Her sculptures and installations intertwine ironically inverted everyday items with staged events charged with poetic resonance. In Elfen, Wohnhaas places a box and its accompanying statement in the exhibition space:
What do we want that seduces us.
Since 2018 Mara Wohnhaas has studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she will complete her degree this summer. In 2021 she received a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, Bonn. In 2014 and 2015 she was a fellow in the master class at the ZKM, Karlsruhe. Her first solo show, Rekommandeur, opened in August 2021 at BQ in Berlin. Her works have appeared in solo and group exhibitions at Uferstudios, Berlin (2024); HAMLET, Zürich (2023); KunstXaus, Zürich (2023); CAPC, Bordeaux (2022); and the MAH Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (2023). The artist lives and works in Düsseldorf.