About Marlon Nikolai
Marlon
Nikolai
Visual artist working across large-scale painting, sculpture, material research and spatial experience.
Biographical note
Born in Wuppertal in 1998. Based in Remscheid.
Nikolai grew up in Wuppertal and studied Communication Design at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. In 2022, a scholarship period at the École Européenne Supérieure de l’Image in Poitiers expanded his practice in an international context.
His artistic work began long before his studies. What could not be communicated adequately through words gradually demanded its own visual language: an evolving vocabulary of material, light, scale, gesture and recurring forms.
The studio
A former tennis hall as a place of production, concentration and transformation.
For around four years, Nikolai has worked in a former tennis hall in Remscheid. Its scale allows paintings and sculptural constellations to exceed the body and become immersive fields of experience.
The studio is both adventurous and protective: a place where physical labour, material resistance and sustained attention meet. Large gestures alternate with dense details; macrocosm and microcosm remain in active relation.
It is a private production site rather than a permanently public venue. Selected invitations and future formats may open the space without dissolving the intimacy on which the work depends.
Practice
Material is not illustration. It is an active condition of experience.
Smoothness, fracture, opacity, reflection and depth are considered not only as visual qualities, but through their bodily and psychological effects. Painting, sculpture and spatial work connect controlled decisions with emergence. The scale requires physical endurance; the detail requires patience. Both belong to the same practice.
Selected chronology
1998 — Born in Wuppertal, Germany
2022 — Scholarship period, École Européenne Supérieure de l’Image, Poitiers
2025 — B.A. Communication Design, HAW Hamburg; thesis Erfahrung des Verborgenen
Ongoing — Lives and works in Remscheid, Germany