Exhibitions

Sven Ballenthin is a Berlin-based artist, who has been working on his Identity series since 2013.

After being turned down by Berlin University of the Arts for 12 consecutive years, Sven Ballenthin was finally accepted in 2012, only to leave months later. Since then, Sven has been painting his signature series, ‘Identity is a choice’, which has lead him to gain international recognition. Not only has his work been featured in prestigious art blogs, television, and press, but his success has also spread into the world of fashion, working on multiple projects with model, Shaun Ross and designer, Nina Athanasiou.

Where did your initial inspiration for the series come from?

I’m very interested in beauty and the question behind ‘what is beauty?’. I remembered the statue of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum in Berlin, her ears are destroyed and only one eye is left, but it looks very beautiful with the distortion. So I started this idea, maybe I can choose very beautiful people and destroy the surface, to get in there and see if their beauty still exists when I destroy them on the surface, and the rest of it was just a process. I choose people who are beautiful, but they have something extra that I cannot describe with words, it’s like yes, these people have it, but these people do not. I can’t say what it is, it’s just something I have a feeling about.