Art concept Hotel Speicherstadt

It started with a kiss

Hamburg | AMERON HOTEL COLLECTION 2015

The works of art grant us intimate glimpses into human modes of communication, showing snapshots of halted time and frozen moments of beauty and silence.

"The Hotel Speicherstadt tells a highly romantic sailor’s love story with its walls." Architectural Digest 02/2015

©: Silvia Foz

The artists use a broad range of various expressions, such as modern and historical photography, sculptures and models, oil paintings and graphic art, murals and collages, each of them reflecting the view of the topic.

©: Magdalena Wimmer

©: Mirjam Fruscella

©: Catalina Somolinos

©: Mirjam Fruscella

“I was very surprised when I entered the AMERON Hotel in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt. Not only did I feel like I was being expectantly welcomed by friends; it was like entering a gallery – which was no contradiction to the cosiness at all. […] It feels like one’s own private little exhibition at some place called hotel, and yet it is far more than just that.”
ENJA JANS Editor of the art magazine ArtMapp

The art concept of a hotel should tell a story, embracing the place and its history without being banal and too obvious. The art pieces in the AMERON Hotel in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt start telling their story already in the entrance hall. A sailor returns home after a long journey and is holding his darling in his arms.
“The Kiss” is a free adaption of the famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Henriette Gruber, an artist from Stralsund, paints the snap-shots of the couple’s life in a street-art manner directly on walls and surfaces using a permanent marker.
The sailors bore “faith, hope and charity” – cross, heart and anchor on their skin when they were exposed to wind and waves for months. The heart makes them feel close to their loved ones at home. The anchor stands for the hope of seeing each other again. And the cross is a symbol for the trust in protection along the journey. The fortune of having returned home safe and sound cumulates here in one passionate kiss. The pictures in the Kaffeebörse build on this motive and turn the tender kiss into pure zest for life.

It is a tale of closeness and distance, of love and desire, farewell and reunion. The harbour as a symbol and reflection of the big wide world is an analogy to the hotel as a place of encounter.
The Berlin photographer Tina Winkhaus, known for her unique photographs of people, transfers her portrait-like style to the world of animals. The powerful rhinoceros stands in contrast to the fragile mountain flamingos, symbolising adventure, the yearning for distant places and the exotic. The New York based photographer Silvia Foz makes use of the new art form “selfie” that owes its increasing popularity to the social networks and is especially favoured when travelling, exaggerating and provocatively displaying it in a new dimension. By compiling her cartoon-like graphics of strange faces on a piece of paper in a rather caricatural style, the Asturian artist Catalina Somolinos creates something of an “anti-selfie”. While the photographer Magdalena Wimmer plays with soul faces – her own and those of other people. Thus, every artist and every art form represents an elementary particle of our story. The history of the AMERON Hotel Speicherstadt Hamburg.