Julia Morganho German, b. 1981
When words appear...
For Julia Morganho, a painting begins with a feeling. A line of words — something she has written, heard, or read — stirs an emotion. That emotion becomes the seed of an idea, and from there the painting takes shape. Only afterwards does the sentence return as the title, a trace of the beginning, but never the whole story. The work always reaches further.
She paints with immediacy and confidence. Moving quickly, she trusts her first gestures, letting the canvas resolve itself in the moment. She does not seek perfect completion, but the point at which a painting feels right in its unfinished state. That is where her works live: on the edge between clarity and openness, whole yet unpolished.
In this way, every painting holds both the intimacy of a private spark and the openness of a public space. The words that first moved her remain as an entry point, but the work invites the viewer to step beyond them. Standing before a canvas, you are asked not only to read its title, but to feel what those words have become — to experience color and form as if they were language transformed.
Raised by an artist father, the studio was her second home. Painting was not an ambition, but a natural language. Later studies in product design sharpened her instinct to reduce, to cut away, to let form stand on its own. Her paintings carry this clarity. Large works are strikingly light, while smaller ones hold an unexpected heaviness — a quiet fact of her practice that flips expectation.
Guided by words, by music, by stories and intuition, Julia Morganho creates works that always hold more than their titles suggest.
Color, light and composition in their purest form
Large, often geometric surfaces, a reduced and finely nuanced choice of colors and, at first glance, seemingly wild applications of paint... This is what characterizes Julia Morganho's work. In her paintings, beauty meets restraint.
Her works - mostly medium-sized and large formats on canvas - are characterized by a very economical - almost simple - composition. Reduced to the essentials, Morganho plays with forms and a carefully applied color palette. Her abstract expressionism is not lavish, but rather minimalist in approach.
This is fitting when you consider that the Hamburg-based artist studied product design as well as art. Having grown up in an environment influenced by music and design, Julia Morganho uses the interplay of grand gesture and simple effect. However, she is not interested in the smooth, design-oriented presentation, but rather in the break that can arise through contrasts.
"I am attracted by the unfinished, the unexpected and also the incongruous - that is the source of inspiration that brings me to painting. I work very intuitively. Sometimes I have the picture and the colors in my head for a long time, and then it takes the right moment for it to transfer from there to the canvas," she reveals when asked how her compositions are created. "Music also plays a big role. It helps me to turn the many abstract thoughts I have into reality."
Fundamentally, Morganho's works are about combining strength and tranquillity. Similar to looking at clouds, it is the constantly changing shapes and structures that make her paintings so special. "I'm interested in the energy that an image can release. It's nice when I see that I can trigger emotions in the viewer without them having to understand or explain it." She recently showed that she succeeds in this brilliantly when she bathed the rooms of a former nuclear bunker in her hometown of Hamburg in brilliant white from floor to ceiling, just to make her works stand out even more dramatically: Color, light and composition in their purest form.