As part of Luxembourg Art Week, the third edition of YLA – Young Luxembourgish Artists is taking place in a pop-up gallery in Bonnevoie. The exhibition sees itself as a launch pad for young local artists who have not yet been exhibited on a larger scale in Luxembourg.
Since 2021, the Valerius Gallery has been organising the project “YLA – Young Luxembourgish Artists”. The idea behind it is to offer a stage to young Luxembourgish artists who have not yet had larger public exhibitions. In cooperation with Garage Arnold Konz, the former showroom of the car dealer was transformed into a pop-up gallery for this year’s edition.
Since there is no real offer for professional artistic training in Luxembourg, most young artists have to study abroad. Of course, this is by no means a bad thing. A stay abroad, especially for artists, is always a chance to broaden one’s horizons. However, this often leads to many local talents staying under the radar, as they have little to no contact with curators, galleries and other artists in Luxembourg.
The aim of the YLA is to present these young talents in Luxembourg and to offer them a stage as well as the opportunity to network with each other, curators and gallery owners in the Luxembourgish art scene.
The featured artists all have a degree in fine arts, were born in the 1980s and 1990s and come from Luxembourg. Apart from that, there are no other intended similarities. Each artist presents his or her own themes, motifs and techniques. The exhibition shows how exciting and promising the future of the national art scene appears to be.
This year, a total of 9 artists are exhibiting:
Xavier Karger (born 1990) combines influences of Pop Art with radical minimalism. He often draws on pop cultural motifs from the 1960s but addresses current social, economic and political issues.
Franky Daubenfeld (born 1994) explores the status of the object as a relic through his oil paintings. In doing so, he relates apparent opposites such as sacrality and secularity, mysticism and technology as well as the organic and the inorganic, thereby creating new, ambivalent spaces of meaning.
Lisa Junius (born 1992) has a clear trademark: floral patterns, spirals and female figures in white and blue tones. She applies these with acrylic on canvas, as wall paintings or on vases and chairs made of clay, creating her own little artistic cosmos.
Lara Weiler (born 1999) is the youngest artist in this year’s edition of the YLA. In her acrylic paintings, she focuses on the beauty of everyday scenes and objects, contrasting with the artificial and posed aesthetics of the social media generation.
Steven Cruz (b. 1996) uses the technique of traditional Portuguese tile painting (azulejo) to create a 2.50 x 2.50 LGBTQ empowerment composition. His composition is subversively reminiscent of Christian ceiling paintings from the Baroque and Rococo periods.
Oriane Bruyat (born 1996) is the only self-taught artist in the group. Her acrylic paintings depict scenes and people from her immediate environment, but always without a face. Thus the personal dimension disappears and the viewer is opened up to her own spaces of memory.
Lara Ruiz (born 1986) works with a wide variety of materials from different contexts for her installations and convinces with her originality. In her artworks, interaction with the space as well as interaction with the audience is an integral part of the overall concept.
Amine Jaafari (born 1991) is primarily interested in textures and structures. Using traditional means such as acrylic and oil paints as well as unconventional materials such as building materials, he combines and experiments to explore the effect and interplay of different surfaces.
Anne Mélan (born 1984) impresses with her mastery of the fine art of oil painting. Her surrealistic paintings portray the inner worlds of the human consciousness, addressing sexuality, perception and identity.
The exhibition can be seen on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays until 18 November at the pop-up gallery of Garage Arnold Konz in Bonnevoie.