Text by art curator Viana Conti (courtesy CE Contemporary Milan, Italy)
Who is Hella Kalkus? Perhaps it would be more correct to say: who are the two personalities of Hella Kalkus coexisting in the same person? Born in Bremen, the city where Kalkus studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, in the field of Fashion Design, before moving to Milan, the Italian city of fashion par excellence, where she continued her studies at the Brera Academy. If her business card looks like Fashion Correspondent and Stylist, her sensitivity, the quality of her gaze, the ability to perceive emotionally, conceptually solve and formally communicate, the rituals and contrasts to the glittering world of fashion make her an authentic painter. (...). But what is her idea of beauty? There are the glamorous glossy magazines, posing models, designer labels, functional icons, decided by the market, the current trend, but also by cinema, television, mass media, the entire changing world that evolves around this mass phenomenon: a Beauty with has captivated its audience male and female, young and old until the next season, to slip, after so much hype, so many glowing testimonies, in silence, quickly giving way to the next trend, sometimes towards a nostalgic vintage throwback. For Hella Kalkus there is also another kind of beauty, timeless: a beauty that responds, on the double side of aesthetic style and the path to knowledge, self betterment, through identity, light and dark, of the other, like games of mirrors, of reflections and self recognition.
