Silke Weissbach (b. 1984) makes abstract paintings that function as living systems, treating transformation as both chemical and affective process. 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 Weissbach to source biological matter directly, through foraging and gathering, which she combines with synthetic ingredients drawn from consumer and cosmetic industries — hyaluronic acid, collagen, plant extracts, mineral compounds. This pairing embodies the central tension in her practice: the entanglement of natural and synthetic systems. 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 crystallisation, absorption, and sedimentation to unfold. The surface operates as a stratified record, each fissure and deposit registering a specific material event.
Her practice is rooted in feminist ecology and an ongoing engagement with shamanic tradition, animist thought, and astrological frameworks — a sensibility attuned to the intelligence of nonhuman life and the cycles that move through it. This 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 near the Baltic Sea in Northern Germany. She studied illustration and graphic design at the University of Applied Arts and sculpture at the University of Fine Arts, 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 the same year. 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.
Studio: London, Uk
