Gallery 2025 – Lilly Pelz

In summer 2025 I graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
My graduation work is about the way I’m feeling about growing up. Or the way how many of us can relate to the feeling of becoming an adult.

The text on the wall tells the story of my thoughts about feeling stuck in the in-between, the Adolescence. Feeling like a child on one hand, feeling like an adult on the other, but neither after all. I learned a lot about growing up in therapy. When I’m talking to my therapist, I’m lying on a bed, facing the wall, while my therapist sits on a chair behind me. It‘s a safe space, free of judgement. It’s very impersonal in a way. You are basically talking to a person you don’t know at all. But still, you are discussing your most intimate thoughts with them.

The bed on the floor embodies exactly that: It’s just a white mattress, with white linens, but the nudity and the brutality of the slept-in fitted sheet on the bare floor indicates total honesty and intimissy. The text on the wall and the mattress have almost exactly the same dimensions, which pictures the process of me lying on the bed, projecting my thoughts onto the wall. The antlers on the wall and the ones on the floor are all made of wax, which is a very sensitive material. They look very strong, they are made to fight and to protect, but in reality, they are very delicate and they break very easily.

All of the antlers are actually sticks and branches, they just embody the antlers of deer for this work. The objects on the floor, surrounding the bed draw the picture of a forest, after a storm. The loose wood, fallen from the trees covers the ground, waiting for autumn and the years to grow moss on them. Growing up to me feels just like that. There are storms we need to conquer, but over time, we learn that after every storm, there comes relaxation. There will be rest. There will be sun. And then we do it all over again.