Astrid Waterstraat’s artistic practice investigates liminal spaces: thresholds where something has ended while what comes next has not yet taken shape. Her work explores transformation as a force that moves through human experience, social structures, and material processes. Rather than illustrating change, she examines how it is experienced and shaped — as tension, rupture, movement, or emergence.
Astrid Waterstraat observes how people respond to uncertainty, external pressure, and situations of transition. Participatory painting labs extend this research beyond the studio, making experiences visible as shared material. These observations become impulses for abstract compositions that remain open to multiple readings.
Her process is intuitive, physical, and experimental. She works with acrylic, water-soluble pastels, ink, and collage, building surfaces through layering, overpainting, erasure, and found fragments. Colour is central: transparent and dense layers shift in relation to one another, creating depth, tension, and luminosity. Marks are made, covered, revealed, and transformed. Unexpected turns and apparent mistakes are not corrected but become starting points for further inquiry.
In her current body of work, “NEULAND”, landscapes become outer topographies and fields of transformation. Tectonic shifts, volcanic forces, and emerging forms evoke processes that exceed control. The paintings are open territories in which change remains visible, active, and unresolved.
Biography
Astrid Waterstraat is a German artist who is born in 1979 near the Danish border and lives and works in Hamburg since 2009. She has developed her artistic practice intensively since 2017, alongside many years of professional work in organisational development, coaching, and transformation processes. Her artistic education is rooted in self-directed study and has been shaped by workshops and intensive courses at the Freie Kunstakademie Hamburg, the Kunstakademie Bad Reichenhall, and Pentiment – International Summer Academy for Art and Design in Hamburg and painting classes with local artists.
Astrid Waterstraat has participated in solo, duo, and group exhibitions in Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich. In 2025, she took part in an international artist residency at ORTO Creative Hub in Portugal. Her work has been shown at MUMA Gallery, konsum163 contemporary art gallery, Galerie 1565, Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, and other exhibition venues. Her practice continues to develop through painting, material experimentation, collaborative exchange, and research into transformation and change.