In her work, Julia Ziegler addresses the relationship between visual and spatial experiences, and between illusion and material presence, while repeatedly investigating the relationship between form and sign. Her conceptual approach is open to diverse media and techniques such as drawing, painting and temporary works in situ. Ziegler restages visual moments of perception and concentrates them in abstraction. The act of seeing always remains at the centre: as a body-based yet detached activity from the body, as a possibility and also as a process. In the series Grüne Hölle, the artist thematises a moment of perception in nature: Without using perspective, she paints a section of the view from the ground upwards until the treetops, with a luminous sky shimmering through the green and yellow foliage. Seen up close, this view fades and an optical inversion takes place: the splintered shapes stamped with impasto varnish on the coloured transparent surface are no longer perceived as the background or as the sky and source of light, but now lie in the foreground as small motifs, causing the viewer's eyes to wander across the picture’s surface, searching and following. Here chaos and order, surface and space, foreground and background wrestle with each other. In her artworks, Ziegler plays with picture planes and structures, thus creating an opportunity to experience the mobility of visual perception in painting.

Julia Ziegler (b. 1963) completed her studies in fine arts in 1990 as a master student in painting at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Since then she has exhibited regularly in Germany and abroad, received numerous scholarships and participated in residencies (e. g. in Japan). She is the co-founder of "oqbo - raum für bild wort ton", established in Berlin in 2008. Ziegler lives and works in Berlin.