This extraordinary opportunity will provide American Visual Artist Nate Anspaugh with one-year support to experience and be exposed to the Berlin Art world scene.  This program gives the artists the chance to present their projects created during their stay at the Lionspalace to a wide public in the mansion’s own gallery after their residency has ended. This exciting residency program is possible thanks to our partner Stiftung Starke Foundation, who also organices national and international visits to museums, galleries and public institutions as well as to representatives in the fields of culture, science, economy, sports and politics. International curators are also invited to the projects by the Starke Foundation.

About the artist Nathan Anspaugh…

Nathan Anspaugh was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1981. He attended the University of Central Florida, earning his BFA in painting and graphic design in 2004. Anspaugh’s mixed-media artworks consider how individual realities are shaped by advertising and other cultural forces. His stacked works—made from innumerable bits of appropriated street art and advertising—reference the stream of corporate and cultural messages that continually invade the individual’s consciousness in American society. What effect does this bombardment have on a person’s desires and motivations? Are these desires real, or created for them? Is an individual capable of parsing these messages and separating real thoughts and wants from those manufactured for them, or does the rush of messages push past one’s consciousness and shape one’s desire without their input? Anspaugh expresses this process through his three-dimensional masks and collages made of advertisements, and in the oil painting Gwynplaine, which takes its title from a character in Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs. The character, with its grotesque smile, is at once delighted and appalled by its own insatiable, manufactured desires.

About The Stiftung Starke Foundation…

Supporting artists in the realization of their ideas and projects is one of the main tasks of the Starke Foundation. Primarily talented, yet not established artists are to be assisted on their path to success. The foundation offers support in all different forms of art: painting / sculpture; architecture / design, music / composition; performance; installation; concept art; literature; contextual work and new media (Internet, photography, video, CD-ROM). The artist in residence program is the key to the purpose of the Starke Foundation. For a period of 3-12 months, the foundation will provide residential and working premises to selected artists. Besides this long term support for young artists, short-term apartments for established artists are available.