Closing Event Sunday, January 11, 2026 2–6 pm Great art in small formats at accessible prices. For the Love of Art! In its fourth EDITIOON, Galerie r8m presents works by 70 international artists. What all the works have in common is their small, square format of approximately 30 × 30 cm. EDITIOON #4, featuring renowned representatives of concrete art, offers an insight into the diversity of forms, colors, and materials found in non-figurative contemporary art.
Exhibition: Counting the waves at low tide
Group exhibition September 24th-28th, 2025 Kunsthafen Rhenania Bayenstr. 28, 50678 Cologne
Under the title “Counting the waves – at low tide,” 17 artists from Kunsthaus Rhenania explore the meaning of art in times of widespread budget cuts. Why make, view, and support art today? The artists present diverse perspectives, media, and approaches that engage with social, personal, or aesthetic questions. The variety of techniques and themes reflects the breadth of human experience and offers a glimpse into current artistic work. The title “Counting the waves – at low tide” alludes to the flow and constant changes in life and artistic creation. It emphasizes conscious perception and reflection of these processes. The exhibition invites visitors to engage with artistic diversity and to consider the personal relevance of art—especially in times of financial “low tide” in cultural funding. It offers an open visual space for discourse, free from ideological boundaries. Artists: Merit Zika | Veronika Moos | Anja Schlamann | Andrea Temming | Gregor Zootzky | Mutsumi Okada | Claudia Betzin | Helmut Brandt | Eva Jeske | Hannah A. Hovermann | Brigitte Mekelburg | Alex Mora | Sylvia Paola Mühlenbein | Christoph Thiemann | MioZając | Sira Zika | Caroline Schilling |
Exhibition: Neue Abstrakte
Neue Abstrakte April 21 – June 8, 2024 Showroom 21, Weißenburgstr. 21, 50670 Köln Opening: April 21, 3 pm
With Neue Abstrakte, Showroom 21 presents a new group of works by Merit Zika that unfold a distinctive, inward-directed approach to abstraction, centered on red and its subtle variations. In these paintings, Zika investigates the relationship between color, surface, and boundary through precisely placed, adjoining color fields that create a dynamic tension between focus and spatial expansion. Fine edges and transitions make lines and colors appear to vibrate, enter into dialogue, and shift perceptually before the viewer’s eye. Rather than extending outward beyond the frame, the compositions build an interior space that deepens within the picture plane. The paintings establish their own boundaries from within, becoming images within images, forms within forms that do not submit to the given format but define themselves autonomously. As the works intensify toward their centers, the surrounding space seems to quiet, inviting the viewer to linger inside the pictorial field rather than looking past it. In Neue Abstrakte, Zika’s clear yet sensuous handling of color and form makes her distinct position within contemporary abstraction tangible — balancing precision with movement, structure with visual intensity, and strong presence with a quiet, inward focus.
Exhibition: Eine kleine Liaison. Malerei im Orangerie-Theater Köln
Merit Zika & Sira Zika — Exhibition at the Orangerie Theater, Cologne
April, 9th – 21st, 2024 Opening: April 9th, 6pm Open during opening hours daily between 11am – 5pm
The Orangerie Theater Cologne presents a new exhibition by the sisters Merit Zika and Sira Zika, two Cologne-born painters whose work engages distinct but complementary approaches to contemporary painting. Both artists studied fine art — Merit at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and Sira at ArtEZ AKI in the Netherlands — and have shared a studio practice in Cologne since 2019, regularly exhibiting together.
Merit Zika’s paintings investigate the relationships between adjacent surfaces, exploring how proportions, edges, and color interactions shape spatial perception within the picture plane. Her process involves a meticulous balancing of tones and forms until the composition reaches a state that feels resolved.
Sira Zika’s work draws on a long-term archive of landscape forms and gestural markings. Her technique often includes poured, fluid color on raw canvas, capturing emergent shapes and transitions as though freezing developmental moments in time.
Together, their works reflect a shared commitment to exploring the expressive potentials of surface, form, and color, while maintaining distinct artistic voices. The exhibition can be visited during the theater’s opening hours, offering an immersive encounter with two interrelated yet individual painterly practices.
Exhibition: Counting the waves on foggy days
Group exhibition Nov. 27th – Dec. 1st, 2024 Kunsthafen im Rhenania Bayenstraße 28, 50678, Cologne
I’ll present pieces from my „Membrane“ and „Transitions“ series. We’ll also sell editions that can be bought for a fair price. Most of the profit from this sell will be donated to Art Asyl.
We also invited special guest Elisabeth Coudoux who will perform at the Vernissage and Sebastian Gramss who will perform at the finissage!
Exhibition: Art in Residence. Sira Zika Merit Zika
Aachener Eins Eins 4 Aachener Str. 114, 50674 Köln June 17 – October 15, 2023 Opening hours: Monday – Friday 9am – 6pm
With Art in Residence, PR Berater present a joint exhibition by the Cologne-born sisters *Merit Zika (1988) and Sira Zika (*1991), who have shared a studio at Kunsthaus Rhenania on the Cologne Rheinauhafen since 2017. After initially pursuing different paths of study, they first came together in a shared studio in London in 2015 and have continued their artistic dialogue in Cologne ever since.
The exhibition brings together two independent yet mutually enriching painterly positions. Sira Zika works with flowing, at times poured paint on raw canvas. In her paintings, organic forms and transitions emerge that make the process of becoming visible and evoke a sense of stretched time and open space; she works with sustainably produced pigments and follows a reduced, sensitive approach. Merit Zika, by contrast, focuses on the nature of the painted surface itself — its relationship to line, boundary, and color. In precisely composed works, she explores how surfaces come into being and relate to one another, until a state emerges that can be experienced as “it is as it is and cannot be otherwise.” Together, the works unfold a tension between process and clarity, chance and decision, fluidity and structure.
Exhibition: November ending
November ending March 14th – June 15, 2022 Showroom 21, Weißenburgstr. 21, 50670 Köln Opening: Sunday, March 13th, 3pm
In the exhibition “November Ending,” time itself becomes a central artistic collaborator. The works do not emerge as finished moments but as processes that unfold over weeks and months — so that November may sometimes end only in February.
The starting point is the present experience that the artist brings into the studio and persistently condenses there. Emotions and thoughts are translated into painterly decisions: into a specific hue, a color combination, a steady, patient movement, or a nervous reworking and radical reordering. Alongside this are moments of calm addition, of extending and carrying forward what already exists, as well as a bold, forward-moving rewriting of the image.
Each newly begun painting marks a rupture — a point of departure from which a temporal arc unfolds. The works grow in layers, in rhythms of placing, changing, overlapping, and preserving. In this way, time becomes not only visible but palpable: as an accomplice in the painting process, as a compositional force that shapes the development of the works.
“November Ending” presents painting as an open, evolving field in which present, memory, and future interweave and take form in color.
Exhibition: Malerei verwandt
October 9th – November 6th, 2022 Museum Zündorfer Wehrturm Hauptstr. 181, 51143 Köln (Porz-Zündorf) Opening: Sunday, October 9th, 3-5pm Opening hours: Wed. 3 – 6 pm Sat. 3 – 6 pm Sun. 3 – 6 pm
In the exhibition “Malerei verwandt”, the works of the Cologne-born sisters Merit Zika and Sira Zika come together in a dialogical parcours throughout the entire Zündorfer Wehrturm. For several years, they have shared a studio at Kunsthaus Rhenania on the Cologne Rheinauhafen, where they engage in an intensive artistic exchange. Both artists are connected by a persistent search for inner expression within abstract painting. Yet they work independently of one another — each following her own path through painting. They are deeply familiar with each other’s work and serve as reliable, honest critics for one another. This ongoing dialogue shapes their artistic development and causes their paintings to appear intertwined in both content and form, without relinquishing their individual autonomy. Alongside their individual practices, Merit and Sira Zika have also jointly developed curatorial projects since 2018, bringing artists together and organizing exhibitions in Cologne — another sphere in which their collaboration takes form. In “Malerei verwandt”, the question is posed: What exactly connects — and what distinguishes — the painting of two sisters? Merit and Sira Zika engage with the entire Zündorfer Wehrturm and invite visitors to explore this relationship themselves — within the tension between surface and space, clarity and atmosphere, precision and process.
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