Silke Weißbach creates abstract paintings that operate as living systems. Her work moves toward an embodied ecology that understands transformation as both chemical and affective — grounded in the conviction that our connection to the living world is a form of knowledge we are learning to remember. Each surface becomes a meeting point between body and land, where organism, material, and environment act upon one another.
Materials enter the work as active agents. Living close to natural environments allows her to source biological matter directly—through foraging and gathering—which she combines with synthetic ingredients from consumer and cosmetic industries. This pairing of foraged and manufactured materials embodies the core tension in her practice: the entanglement of natural and synthetic systems. She works with hyaluronic acid, collagen, plant extracts, mineral compounds, and gathered botanicals. Their behaviour determines the formation of the image: liquids pool and withdraw, surfaces contract and fracture, pigments concentrate and disperse. Weißbach calibrates these conditions through timing, layering, and environmental control, allowing processes of crystallisation, absorption, and sedimentation to unfold. The surface operates as a stratified record in which each fissure, deposit, and shift in density registers a specific material event.
Her practice is rooted in feminist ecology and in an ongoing engagement with shamanic traditions, animist thought, and astrological frameworks. She has developed a sensibility attuned to the intelligence of nonhuman life and the cycles that move through it. This ongoing research articulates a visual language of metabolic intimacy: painting as a means of sensing the porous relations among substance, technology, and life.
Weißbach grew up in northern Germany near the Baltic Sea. She studied Illustration and Graphic Design at the University of Applied Arts and Sculpture at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg before completing her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2020), where she now lives and works. She was awarded the Winsor & Newton and Paul Smith Foundation Art Prize in 2025 and completed the Imagination Fellowship at Arizona State University in the same year. In recent years, she was shortlisted for the London Bronze Sculpture Fellowship (2023), the Cob Award (2024) for an interdisciplinary project on collective intelligence, bioacoustics, and ecological consciousness, and the Somerset House digital residency programme (2023). Her Correspondence (Sugar) series, initiated in 2020, was added to the Jan van Eyck Future Materials Bank in 2022. In 2024, she undertook residencies at Xenia in North Hampshire and Porthmeor Studios in Cornwall.
