It's not so important what you see, but how you see it ...

This sentence was uttered some years ago by a photographer from Malaysia whom I had met briefly at an award ceremony in Linz (Trierenberg Super Circuit). Whether this statement really came from him or whether he was just quoting another, I don't know and it's not that important but it has stuck with me ever since. After all, it fits in perfectly with my work. I don't document, but create pictures with photographic means that have been created in my imagination. Seemingly uninteresting, simple things can take on a completely different meaning when they are removed from reality and assigned to other objects in a different size.

​My surreal and fantastic paintings have a distinct fairytale style, partly inspired by Magritte and Dalí. Sometimes, however, a word, read or heard, is enough to create an image in my mind. It often happens that an object fascinates me so much that I immediately see another scene behind it.

The realisation in the computer is then sometimes a bit more difficult..

My name is Brigitte Kuckenberg-Wagner, I was born and live in Solingen, Germany.

After studying free painting and graphic arts in Cologne, I worked for several years as a graphic artist for the city planning of Solingen and later as a freelance artist.

During this time I had several exhibitions and was a member of the Solingen Artists' Association for a long time. My favourite media were drawings and mixed media.

At the same time, I always took a lot of photographs, mostly to document lighting moods, colours, etc. for my works.

That changed in the mid-90s with the discovery of Adobe Photoshop and with it digital art. It fascinated me from the beginning, as it opened up incredible experimental possibilities.

At that time, however, it was still a relatively new medium and the art scene mostly didn't take it seriously. This slowly changed with further developments in technology and so later I finally started to move from " analogue " painting and graphics to photomontage.

My pictures are composed of photographed, painted and rendered parts, new picture worlds, dream worlds, somewhere between real and surreal, are created from fragments of reality. Only photos from my own archive are used.

Software used: Photoshop, Corel Painter and Blender 3d.

Numerous awards at national and international competitions and positive feedback on the internet confirm that this was the right decision.