With this exhibition, the artist completes the annual series „do you want it black or white?“ 2026 at the Roland Phleps Foundation for Concrete Art. With her large-format wood works, Helga Weihs opens up spaces in which light and shadow, openness and closure meet.
At the center is the work „Rebuild“, which has been created in ever-changing constellations since 2016. The exhibition space is reflected here - not as a rigid wall, but as stacked wooden slats through which light flows. Boundaries become permeable, spaces transparent, and the familiar appears new and fragile.
Inside and outside, positive and negative, light and dark - these contrasts run through Helga Weihs’ work. Strips and panels are arranged next to and on top of each other to create floor and wall works, from which stripes, openings and filigree structures emerge. Visitors can enter some of these spaces, walk around the lines and shadows, experience the light between the slats and thus become part of the work.
HELGA WEIHS (*1952 in Schwalefeld / Waldeck) lives and works in Cologne. She studied at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences for Art and Design (FHKD) under Pravoslav Sovák and film under Claudia von Alemann at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences. Helga Weihs is a co-founder of the Künstlerhaus Dortmund. Grants and artist projects have taken her to Israel (1997 and 1998), China (1996, 1997) and Japan (2007).
She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including in 2025 at Wedinghausen Monastery, Arnsberg, together with the Schroth Collection, at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Darmstadt (2022 and 2021), and at Güstrow Palace – Staatliches Museum Schwerin in 2010. In addition, she has exhibited several times at the Vasarely Museum Budapest, roughly in the years 2022, 2021, 2018, and 2013.