Afshan Daneshvar

paper positions award winner 2024 

Afshan Daneshvar’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in her choice of paper as a medium, a material that embodies both fragility and resilience. Paper, with its ability to record, preserve and yet disintegrate over time, serves as a metaphor for memory, identity and transformation in her work. Through different series, Afshan has explored its qualities — its capacity to be shaped, layered and reconstructed — allowing her to navigate personal and collective histories with sensitivity and precision.

In “The Red Line” series by Afshan Daneshvar, newspapers are transient yet authoritative; they inform, document and shape narratives. At the same time, they are ephemeral, discarded as quickly as they are consumed. By folding, layering, and gluing these printed pages, Afshan extends their lifespan, transforming fleeting news into enduring forms—not just physically, but as artworks that demand attention and contemplation. Their permanence is no longer tied to their original function as sources of information but rather to their aesthetic and conceptual reinvention. The recontextualization of these newspapers as sculptural works highlights the overlooked beauty in the mundane, prompting a deeper reflection on what is deemed disposable — both in material culture and in the narratives that shape collective memory.

Discover the works by paper positions award winner Afshan Daneshvar at paper positions berlin, booth → #71

Text: Orkideh Daroodi

 

Vienna 12 November 2024

Alice Attie

Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna

Chaos and order, systems, curves, forces, and unpredictability — Alice Attie explores phenomena in her drawings, striving to capture them, to mirror them on paper. The New York-based artist is captivated by language, its symbols, the flow of sentences, their beauty, but also by the edges and angles of letters. She is fascinated by their potential to foster both understanding and miscommunication. Attie arranges letters in precise disarray across a sheet, so that in their collective interplay, they form a new shape — a universe of symbols. Words line up, creating literal ripples on the page. The repetition and slight variation of gestures are the tools with which Attie conjures a mathematical tenderness, a geometric delicacy. Her interest in philosophy and physics is evident in her works — not only when she transforms notes from seminars into drawings but also when multicolored blocks with frayed edges stack into a “Building” without quite relying on one another. quare blocks float one above the other, yet together they evoke a sense of static, but in that space, art maintains balance. Alice Attie’s drawings can be seen at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder from Vienna.

Vienna 12 November 2024

Alix Stadtbäumer

arToxin, Munich

Alix Stadtbäumer is captivated by organic forms and everyday objects. She shapes oversized screws from cardboard, binoculars as big as a toddler, or a tape dispenser with sharp teeth. Surrounded by sculptural vines and prints of rocks and tulips, the result is kind of a cabinet. Perhaps it’s a botanical, yet somewhat bureaucratic, cabinet? Stadtbäumer’s garden thrives in the space between the practical and the floral. And of course, there’s a magnificent “lantern tree” to admire as well. You can see Alix Stadtbäumer’s works at the stand of arToxin from Munich.

Vienna 12 November 2024

Judith Eisler and Carsten Fock

Charim Gallery and Zeller von Almsick, Vienna

What do Judith Eisler’s and Carsten Fock’s works have in common? Perhaps it’s the blurred quality, the magic within the captured, only seemingly real, moment. Judith Eisler paints images taken from film. She pauses the film, freezes a moment filled with tension or emotion, photographs the screen, and then translates the captured film scene into painting. The level of reality the film pretends to show is given two additional media layers through Eisler’s process, which, somewhere between them, preserve a new kind of truth. Her paintings possess a magnetic pull, flourishing in a meta-reality.

Similarly, Carsten Fock’s works are striking for their haziness, their depiction of nature, of the real world, which looms behind a mist, with a faint hint of a mountain or a wisp of blue. As romantic as this powerful, seemingly natural world spreads across his canvases, the paint and the manual application also serve as a reference to the process of painting itself. The paint on the surface is real — but the rest? Maybe that, too.

Charim Gallery and Zeller van Almsick, both from Vienna, are sharing a booth, bringing together these two artistic perspectives to create a blurred reality.

Vienna 12 November 2024

David Roth

Elektrohalle Rhomberg, Salzburg

David Roth takes the term "landscape painting" literally. He lets the landscape do the painting, while he remains a guiding presence in the background. Since 2009, Roth has repeatedly dragged his primed but untouched canvases through nature. Once, he walked for two days from his apartment through the Vienna Woods to an exhibition opening, where he presented the resulting landscape-painted work directly in the Graf+Zyx Foundation exhibition space in Neulengbach. Along the way, the canvas even provided him with shelter.
Roth’s works emerge incidentally — he is fascinated by the peripheral, which through his refinement becomes the centerpiece. The starting point of this practice, where the art creates itself, was his work "A History of Painting." He stitched together four large banners from many small cloths, collected over the years, that he had used to clean his brushes. Parts of his "Flower Paintings" series will be shown at paper positions vienna by Elektrohalle Rhomberg from Salzburg. Instead of brushes, Roth uses various flowers, each bringing its own unique stroke to the specially made paper. The flowers are guided, but never controlled. Their blooms create flowing trails of ink, blossoming on the paper a second time. A sunflower transforms into an ink palm. Nature itself is David Roth's tool.

Vienna 12 November 2024

Dan Vogt

Shore Gallery, Vienna

Peter Pan swings his sword, sending large, blood-red and green splashes flying. His body casts an architectural shadow as chess pieces wobble, shoot, and topple. Dan Vogt’s ballpoint pen drawings are fairy-tale-like, yet a brutality runs through them that’s hard to explain. It can’t simply be these few blood-like drops — they could just as well be sweat, because there’s movement everywhere. The page is never truly still, even the red castle on the horizon seems to melt, and staircases invite to an endless ascent. But should one really go up there? A bodiless arm in a green sleeve reaches into the image, pointing somewhere with a swollen, red index finger. We point to Dan Vogt and the Shore Gallery from Vienna, it’s so wonderfully suspect.

Vienna 12 November 2024

Mimmo Palladino

Brita Prinz Arte, Madrid

Horses leap, and heads roll. Wild lines, geometric shapes, and intense colors define the work of Italian artist Mimmo Paladino. Alongside names like Francesco Clemente, Paladino is one of the key figures of the Italian Transavanguardia movement. They rejected the minimalist and conceptual art trends of the 1960s, responding by returning to traditional painting and sculpting techniques, while embracing the full range of artistic expression. Inspired by prehistoric figuration, symbolism, and the mythology of the Renaissance and Antiquity, Paladino’s work celebrates pure artistic freedom at its core. Paladino and his peers refuse to be pinned down by any specific style, and in this rejection, they form their own. Paladino has explored art through every medium — including paper. Brita Prinz Arte from Madrid will exhibit some of his paper works, which radiate with freedom, unfazed by contemporary attempts to categorize them. Paladino's pieces are refreshingly bold, powerful, and independent — true role models of creative expression.

Berlin 12 March 2024highlight

Henrik Eiben and Lyonel Feininger

SCHWARZ CONTEMPORARY, Berlin
and Thole Rotermund Kunsthandel, Hamburg

Lyonel Feininger (1871 - 1956) is a known figure. Village churches, streets, geometry - within the circle of Blauer Reiter and as part of the famous artists’ group Die Brücke, he is considered a significant pioneer of Classical Modernism. Starting with caricature, Feininger increasingly found his own expression, experimented with printmaking, and evolved in the early 20th century towards sharp-edged, cubist-multiperspective drawings, focusing on the architecture of small towns.

In a sharp yet gentle aesthetic, Henrik Eiben and Lyonel Feininger extend their hands across the century that lies between them. In clear lines, areas of color that often blend strongly with each other, and follow random paths, Henrik Eiben extracts a formal and coloristic essence from Feininger’s works. For the first time at paper positions berlin, two galleries present two positions that are directly related to each other. Henrik Eiben’s perspective on Feininger highlights a shared affinity for wit and thoughtfulness. Each with their own dynamism, but a shared occasional smile.

Henrik Eiben is represented by SCHWARZ CONTEMPORARY from Berlin and Lyonel Feininger by Thole Rotermund Kunsthandel from Hamburg.

Berlin 11 March 2024highlight

Farniyaz Zaker

O Gallery, Tehran 

Delicate seedlings stretch their fragile roots unsuccessfully towards the earth, suspended in the air, enclosed by broad black outlines much like an asphalted sidewalk delineates a front yard. Neatly delineated by color, bedstraw and friends can only point to their health-promoting powers on Farniyaz Zaker's paper. In their restricted collaged environment, they will soon hang their heads. With her series "Dress Code for a Cul-de-Sac," Farniyaz Zaker refers to the encounter between fragile plant and inorganic geometry, reflecting on the moment of inclusivity and exclusivity, of being part of something yet not really. She celebrates the beauty of a garden that simultaneously remains subject to its inherent nature, being merely a fragment of nature. At the O Gallery stand from Tehran, thoughts about inclusion and exclusion blossom, and rootlessness becomes a fragile subject in the imagery. 

Berlin 11 March 2024highlight

Tim Berresheim

Galerie Elisabeth & Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart

The eye collects information and transmits it to the brain. Within this cooperation, there's a constant attempt to identify resemblances to familiar concepts and decode visual content. Tim Berresheim's works challenge this process. What is seen in his paintings is hardly clear to the eye. They are enigmatic, demand a tactile way of seeing, and then fill themselves with content that defies all logic. Textures of diverse kinds intertwine and weave together, resembling a cluster of hair, a strand of Styrofoam, modeling clay, and a strip of checkered paper, evoking school memories. Surreal objects emerge when Tim Berresheim generates and assembles fragments on the computer. In an undefinable space, the materials knot themselves, liquid metal flows, and the lines curl. One can get lost in his works, follow strands of thought that lead nowhere, and experience how liberating it can be not to fully understand something. Tim Berresheim's works are presented by the Galerie Elisabeth & Reinhard Hauff from Stuttgart.

new in 2025: ceramic positions

our new highlight at paper positions berlin 2025!

With the curated special exhibition ceramic positions, we would like to set another special accent at paper positions berlin. Ceramics as a material has not only undergone a new development among young artists for some time now - it is also arousing ever greater interest among collectors and institutions, as this medium is capable of constantly exploring the boundaries of art in new ways.
With works by Hans-Peter Adamski, Anna Arnskötter, Fritz Bornstück, Veronique Bourgoin, Isabelle Dyckerhoff, Ute Essig, Alberto Gianfreda, Nonna Hoogland, Nadira Husain, Susanna Inglada, Magda Krawcewicz, Liene Mackus, Georgij Melnikov, Miriam Schahabian, Štěpánka Sigmundová, Malwine Stauss, Juli Susin und Dorothee Wenz.

looking back at paper positions berlin 2024

“The airy salon format in the historic hall of the Telekom Hauptstadtrepräsentanz underlines the fact that a trade fair does not impress with its size.” - tagesspiegel 26.4.

In 2024, 60 galleries from 11 countries presented more than 150 artistic positions and 3 awards were presented.
The four days were characterised by positive reports from gallery owners and visitors. They all spoke enthusiastically about the great, open and familiar atmosphere, about how many new contacts they were able to make over the fair days and how many young collectors in particular made purchases. Exhibitors were able to report very good sales, and many galleries were almost completely sold out by the end of the fair.

The LEUE&NILL Award was given to the duo-presentation of Henrik Eiben reacting to Lyonel Feininger's works shown by SCHWARZ CONTEMPORARY and Thole Rotermund Kunsthandel.  The winners of this year's Paper Art Award are 
Asareh Akasheh (Sammlung und Residency Olivier von Schulthess), Leonie Mertes (Galerie Heike Strelow), Rikuo Ueda (Mikiko Sato Gallery), Noriko Ambe (AOA;87), Hiroyuki Abe (Mikiko Sato Gallery).

Berlin 25 February 2024

Looking back at paper positions berlin 2023

"High quality, flooded with light, affordable for average earners and with a genuinely warm atmosphere: "Paper Positions", the spring spin-off of the Berlin art fair "Positions Berlin" and with appearances in five European cities, is one of the more cheerful art fairs." - tip Berlin

With over 16,000 visitors, the art fair paper positions and the participating galleries can draw a positive conclusion from the seventh edition of the fair in Berlin. For four days, visitors were able to go on a paper discovery tour, expand their collections or purchase their first works in the atrium of Deutsche Telekom Hauptstadtrepräsentanz. On Thursday evening, Galerie Malte Uekermann Kunsthandel received the LEUE&NILL Award for Jens Hanke's solo presentation; artists Ursula Sax (Semjon Contemporary), Gisoo Kim (mianki.Gallery), Amparo Sard (Galerie Anita Beckers), Brian Dettmer (Galerie Commeter) and Taniguchi Kenichiro (Mikiko Sato Gallery) were honoured with the PAPER ART AWARD.

Berlin 25 February 2024

paper positions award 2023

The winner of the paper positions award 2023 is Katharina Hinsberg (Galerie Werner Klein) The award is realised by POSITIONS Berlin and supported by Kaiserwetter.

The works by Katharina Hinsberg presented by Galerie Werner Klein (Cologne) are captivating in their lightness and daintiness. Hinsberg delicately outlines the paper with a red pencil and meticulously cuts along the lines with a scalpel. Her wafer-thin paper frameworks hang delicately from thin needles. In their playful and subtle manner, Hinsberg’s works leave an impression on the viewer that not only encourages a sensitive interaction with them, but also promotes greater sensitivity.