NEW YORK -- Four artists with studios in Dusseldorf have come together to create this provocative place for dreaming they call "Weltengarten" or World Garden. They are sculptors Herbert Willems & Alexandre Magno painter Bjoern Dressler, installation artist Gisela Alt and photographer / sculptor Julia van Koolwijk. Though each of them approach her or his work and vision in ways quite unique from one another, their work holds together with the sense of the grandeur in moments that each artist has tried to capture. 

They have joined together to form a group called "Weltengarten" which in English means "World Garden" and refers to a utopian sense of city and life as garden. Working under the subject of "Urban Living", their political and artistic interests have moved towards the private realm, a theme that they explore and share in this exhibit. 

The almost classical paintings of Herbert Dressler go through many stages before completion, necessitating repeated sittings of his models for the numerous drawings he makes before his final paintings, most of which are no larger than 30". There is a delicacy and thoughtfulness one feels in the brushstrokes heightened by the contrasting areas of focused completion and almost studied incompletion. It's as if the paintings are never finished or never unfinished, but captured instead in a moment of reverence. 

Gisela Alt's diamond shaped cloud of blue balloons is inspired by a Goethe poem. Partially filled with water, the cloud filled "Sky at Night" is a floating apparition that beckons one as clouds do, especially when viewed as one lies back in the grass gazing skyward on a warm
summer evening. Alexandre Magno's inflated columns of solid colored fabric stand silently breathing at the periphery as if on guard. 

Julia van Koolwijk (who studied in San Francisco and Paris) created in installation of photographs mounted on the wall above a "couch" filled with a mass of photo images of friends and family, heat-transferred, stitched and stuffed into a multitude of pillows. In all sizes, from 1 or 2 inches to as large as a foot and a half, the "pillow sculptures" harken back to the stuffed sculpture of 70's feminist artists, but more importantly, they spoke warmly of the many stories of love in this artist's life. 

In the photos on the wall was a story too, of a couple clearly loving as well, the woman chewing on the man's beard as they are caught on film. None are studied portraits, but instead are snapshots telling of wonderful moments together.

They have a poem that speaks of the essence of their intent:

 "Sleeping is fine under a German down blanket. 
In the land of our dreams we hold the power.

There we've discovered a creative energy that does not exist in contemporary culture.

A space outside subjectivism, modernism or pop-culture, this small world is our delusion of grandeur." -- Weltengarten