In the first week, we will stage figurative situations with life-size dolls and approach figurative painting through studies on large-sized paper. Our main aim is to support the participants in developing a pictorial space with colour.

In the second week, the participants will paint from a model. We will talk together every day about the resulting works, with the aim of gaining insights into the effects of colour, form, material and composition. In order to better understand the materials, we would like to encourage painting on different media: paper, hardboard and canvas with casein using tempera paint and oil paint. The canvases will be built and primed by the participants themselves and we will make casein tempera paints together.

The programme also includes two museum visits to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections) to investigate the question of the figure in pictorial space and how painters dealt with it in the past.

Theory

An art history seminar led by art historian Susanne Altmann, titled "From Public Art to Art in Public Spaces", will be held during the workshop phase. The seminar also includes two city walks.

From Public Art to Art in Public Spaces - An introduction to artistic strategies for urban environ- ments, contexts of architecture and other field work.
We will explore the principle of democracy that comes with public spaces and how (or not) it is re- flected by public sculptures after World War II and observing how community-based art and context- specifity takes over. We will discuss good and not so good examples worldwide, including activist movements that employ artistic means.

City Walks

(1) In the first of our two lecture walks in the centre of Dresden, we will encounter how inventive artists dealt with socialist culture politics and found their way to geometrical abstraction and minimalism by collaboration with modern construction. We will visit Prager Straße, one of the most prestigious pedestrian boulevard in German Democratic Republic, the Palace of Culture and an architectural ensemble of around 1980 which recently was listed as landmark and accomodates contempo- rary art spaces.

(2) Our second lecture walk investigates a more recent layer of public art, namely the results of the municipal programme that has been growing for 25 years with artistic interventions by Jozef Legrand, Franka Hörnschemeyer, Erwin Stache, Reiner Split and others. We will complement our walk with a critical look on contemporary architecture and urban planning such as Altmarkt and Neumarkt.