Foundation Class

The two-semester orientation phase, the Visual Arts foundation studies, affords you and students of Fine Arts and Art Education an opportunity to transform your artistic potential into a constructive and creative process and to discover the artistic action and reflection strategies that suit you.

The university studio, the workshops of the Kunsthochschule Kassel, public space and virtual space are the action space for the study programme in Visual Arts. In addition to classical techniques like painting, sculpture, drawing and graphic art, video works, intermedia installations, interventions, interdisciplinary projects, performances and actions, sound art, artist's books, photography, creative writing and language are possible fields of experimentation and media of expression. We perceive not only the artistic production, but also students' presentation and mediation of their own works to be part of artistic practice.

Through your own artistic activity, upon which we reflect during presentations in the foundation class and in individual discussions, in seminars providing an introduction to artistic media, through brief presentations about current artists, in field trips and based on your independent research in the library, in the documenta archive etc., you give a concrete form to your personal ideas, which you address thematically in your artistic practice.

Transferring ideas, feelings, thoughts and concepts to practical works is a complex process, which is different for each individual and may be extremely contradictory. One often achieves the most exciting results via circuitous routes, by accident or by unplanned means, providing we trust our personal intuition, which lets us diverge from our actual plan in order to take alternative routes. In addition to such openness, however, perseverance, initiative and an ability to ignore resistance are also necessary for asserting ideas.

Through his or her artistic work, an artist always adopts a specific socially relevant and political stance. In this respect, art is a personal comment and self-positioning in a social and everyday context. It is in this spirit that we view the Kunsthochschule, on the one hand, as a field in which to experiment with possibilities and utopias; on the other hand, however, it is also a reality in the real social contexts in which ideas are realized by dint of our will.