STUDIO VISIT: ANNABELL HÄFNER

“This space is sacred to me, it is the most personal reflection of me possible.” There is a constant flux noticeable in the atelier of model and artist Annabell Häfner. A fluidity very much integral to her work as a painter, she says, and to the place she calls more home than her apartment, “I just poured my self into this room, it’s a visual representation of my whole life.” One grim autumn afternoon in Berlin, in the studios of the Berlin Weissensee School of Art, Annabell let us into her mind–or at least the colourful, painted, and constantly evolving haptic version of it.

“I noticed that my pictures improve when I have all my previous work around me,” she explains, “I need to see my older work as it ceaselessly influences my ability to move forward. It’s very much a process.” That is why in her studio, we are not only surrounded by Annabell’s large-size paintings, but also by video art, photographs, and personal keepsakes – functioning as everyday reminders of how the past is her most powerful tool for keeping creating in the future. “I use my atelier as kind of an archive as I work a lot with memories and emotions I felt at certain times. When I am here I get very nostalgic, I reflect a lot on myself – but I need those feelings to be able to work. In my personal life I actually am someone who doesn’t really like change, so I constantly challenge myself through what I do.” With her paintings, Annabell is then looking to freeze these situations, drawing from what and who is around her and giving it an abstract layer by adding her own experiences: “It isn’t about directly reflecting my surrounding, after all the colours and composition constantly change, but about expressing my perception of my life through my work in that exact moment.”

Annabelle is creating an image not taken by a camera, but by the blink of an eye – and not preserved in pixels, but through a feeling and a brushstroke. Lead by that same sense of fluidity, Material Magazine’s editor in chief Jan-Michael Quammie and beauty editor Manu Kopp have added their very own set of most valued pieces to Annabell’s archive of memories for our shoot in her studio – with a variety of genderfluid looks by New York-based designer Ximon Lee at the very core of Jan’s curation of season highlights.