What did the origin of the world look like? Is cell division an archetypical form of communication? For more than seventeen years the Munich artist Judith Milberg has been asking such questions about the mystery of being, of both humankind and nature, in her paintings, works on paper and, as of late, in her sculptures as well. Just as material, space and time were created 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang, the Cambrian Period was the first era in the earth’s history during which fauna and flora developed around 540 million years ago and, as such, the beginnings of life as we know it today evolved.

Within this material, space and time-related continuum of universal energy the artist positions herself anew with every work. She talks of an inner explosion, an inner need that she allows her unmistakable pictorial language to explore. Experiments with the most varied of materials and techniques form the beginning. Milberg starts with a copper-based ink, adds a specific type of vinegar herself and mixes it with interference and metallic pigments. With considerable physical exertion she rubs pastel chalks, charcoal and pigments onto paper, wood and natural canvases, producing surprising results with extremely fine, powdery-delicate nuances of colour.

Colours in transparent shades, amorphous, ornamental and spherical shapes cover whole surfaces of her pictures, with neither a beginning nor an end and in ever new metamorphoses, layers and fusions. ‘It is wrong to define an upper or a lower’, is the title of one painting – revealing her elemental understanding that there are no hierarchies in art but only interconnections, dialogues and transformations instead.

More recently Milberg has also been making sculptures out of clay. The move into three-dimensionality was long overdue bearing in mind the cuboidal,