portrait: Robert Vanis

about

Victoria Gentsch is a visual artist working across sculpture, photography, and performance. Her practice approaches art as both a human condition and a natural force, creating works that function as spaces of holding: structures that contain ideas, materials, and emotions much like vessels, nests, or shelters.

Gentsch studied painting, media art, and art history at the University of Osnabrück, completing her bachelor’s degree in 2014 under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Barbara Kaesbohrer and Friederike von Behren. She continued her artistic training at the Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK Dresden), where she studied sculpture and spatial art. During her studies she participated in international exchange and residency programs, including a residency at Hansung University in Seoul in 2018 with the class of Prof. Eberhard Bosslet (HfBK Dresden), and a study period at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM) in the Studio of Glass led by Rony Plesl.

She received her Diploma from HfBK Dresden in 2021 and completed her Meisterschüler (master class) in the class of Prof. Monika Brandmeier in 2025.

Alongside her artistic practice, Gentsch regularly develops and leads workshops on spatial art and photography for school pupils, university students, and adult participants. With a background in art education and art history, she combines artistic practice with pedagogical approaches that make complex artistic processes accessible while encouraging deeper engagement with contemporary art.

Gentsch lives and works in Dresden, Germany.

artist statement

The act of locating oneself, as the sensation of a here and now, feels like a fragile construction. Do I remain who I am, and if so, for how long? When do mere coordinates transform into a ‘place’? It is this threshold between spatial orientation and a sense of belonging that art so often probes.

In the bright chamber of photographic thought, between the flatness of two dimensions and the illusion of the image, we encounter dimensions that we seem to invent: spaces we can sense, shells we can break open, relics we can recover. Art becomes an archaeological practice, revealing voids by peeling back accumulated layers.

My solo-works in the form of sculptures, interventions and media art, express the material exploration and feeling of the condition of living in a human shell with skin as our border and being in this world with many other borders and social systems that often don’t show love and care. My works tell directly and autonomously what comes together in them and how it radiates to the outside as an entity. 

Voids stretch between the person we strive to be and the one we are; or perhaps once were. In this tension, the body’s vulnerability becomes evident: the ever-present reminder of mortality and the irreversible decay of the body along its path toward death, while longing for a nest, a shelter, a vessel, at least one for the eyes to touch.

Yet art does not remain fixed in the existential alone. It also examines economic and material conditions. Process-oriented creation becomes a gesture of freedom in artistic practice, a dynamic between chaos and control.