Wiebke Siem (1954 Kiel, DE – Berlin, DE) became known in the 1990s for extensive installations in which she alienated everyday objects, such as pieces of clothing, shoes, bags, or toys, or transformed them into oversized objects. Wiebke Siems uses pieces of furniture, objects, and materials with domestic connotations and whimsical, often puppet-like figures to create psychologically charged installations that are as oppressive as they are humorous and that raise questions about societal role models. Siem’s art repeatedly employs a formal language and a mode of presentation that refer to ethnological objects and collections. This enables her to comment on Modernism’s problematic appropriation strategies toward non-European art. In addition to borrowing motifs from art and cultural history, Siem critically engages the mechanisms of the male-dominated art business – a central theme in her oeuvre.

In less than two decades, Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876-1923) created a powerful oeuvre comprising paintings, woodcuts, glass works and mosaics. Her expressive subjects, including landscapes, townscapes and harbour scenes, are characterised by luminosity and increasing transparency, by rhythmical compositions of the pictorial space, black contours and an intensive use of colour. After her artistic beginnings in the circle around Mondrian and elsewhere, Jacoba van Heemskerck belonged to the centre of the avant-garde movement emanating from the "Sturm" of Herwarth Walden in Berlin - the gallerist and publisher who made artists like Marc, Kandinsky and Jawlensky famous. Her work is shaped by her orientation towards Anthroposophy, which bears witness to her interest in the elemental effect of light and colour on the viewer. Her creative work is highly topical today thanks to her understanding of nature and the cosmos as a world viewed as a whole.