About the artist
Marlon
Nikolai
Visual artist working across large-scale painting, sculpture, material and space.
Biographical note
Between discipline and discovery.
Marlon Nikolai was born in Wuppertal in 1998. Painting became an early way of thinking through image, atmosphere, surface and material. An early painterly formation with Wuppertal-based artist Leif Skoglöf Swedish-born and established in Wuppertal for decades, Leif Skoglöf trained at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and received a Yale scholarship. His international exhibition practice reaches back to the 1970s. Website ↗ established a strong technical and visual foundation. From there, Marlon Nikolai developed an independent artistic position over time — increasingly self-directed, experimental and cross-media.
A specialist qualification in design, a scholarship period at the École européenne supérieure de l’image in Poitiers and a B.A. in Communication Design at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences became stations within this development rather than its definition. Learning is understood less as a prerequisite for action than as something that emerges through direct experience. Since 2022 Marlon Nikolai has worked from a former tennis hall in Remscheid. The hall became an amplifier of an already expansive practice and set a new scale for extraordinarily large-format, physical and spatial work.
“When I make art, I enter a state in which thought, feeling, body and material begin to align. That is where insights and forms emerge that I could not have fully planned beforehand.” — Marlon Nikolai
Selected milestones
Practice in motion.
Scholarship period, ÉESI Poitiers
An international art-school context expands the practice beyond its previous working environments.
EMIK Postwerk, Berlin
Live painting in collaboration with Roman Nagel.
Unknown Fractures, Spreehalle Berlin
Group exhibition in Berlin.
MIND MOVES MATTER, Pina Bausch Zentrum
Solo presentation within the WU-TAL session in Wuppertal.
B.A. Communication Design, HAW Hamburg
The degree project brings artistic practice, visual communication and research into one field.
Erfahrung des Verborgenen
Continuous research and artistic practice deepen the ongoing investigation of perception, materiality and the hidden.
Scale & embodiment
Larger than the body!
Large formats make the work bodily and immersive. They ask how far an image, a gesture and the body making it can be pushed. Carrying, climbing, sanding, building and repeated movement become part of the process. At the same time, the opposite scale is equally compelling — details small enough to disappear into. Magnitude and concentration remain in tension.
“Transience can feel like a cold shower of recognition. It suddenly makes time tangible — and presence all the more valuable.” — Marlon Nikolai
Artist statement
Presence changes what becomes visible.
The practice is concerned with what becomes visible when perception is given time. A painted sky can carry temperature; a reflective surface can shift spatial depth; a small material change can alter the emotional register of an entire work. The works ask viewers not only to look, but to stay long enough for these differences to open up.
This is where the research into the hidden begins: not with the promise of a final explanation, but with the attempt to create visual, material and spatial conditions in which something previously implicit can become experience.
Read the full artistic position → Public research edition ↗
The atelier
Adventure and shelter. Freedom and order.
The former tennis hall in Remscheid is both inspiration and challenge. Its dimensions set a new physical scale for extraordinarily large work and make spatial, long-term processes possible. Expansive thinking is not dependent on square metres; the space simply gives it more room to become physical. At the same time, the hall demands organisation, maintenance and endurance. For Marlon Nikolai, the atelier therefore exists between adventure and shelter, freedom and responsibility.
Studio visits by prior appointment or invitation only.
Enter the studio →