“Willkommen am Schleckstrand” (Welcome to Sweetlick Beach) invites you to a shoreline that is not merely visited but devoured. This mixed-media installation constructs a fiction that explores the uncanny relationship between pleasure, desire, and decay.
The work begins with the ironic Lick Shells—a candy mimicking seashells, which are themselves empty exoskeletons. A seagull skeleton glazed in sugar becomes a consumable vanitas symbol, where disgust transforms into alluring repulsion. Likewise, a caramel Venus rises from a scallop shell, quoting Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Reborn as a deity of this consumable realm and born from “the delicious fusion of blood and sugar,” she embodies the threshold between pleasure and pain.
The work adopts advertising aesthetics only to subvert them: a hand-painted poster mimics storybook idealism, while a photo series captures consumers oscillating between ecstasy, aggression, and lethargy.
In the end, the “oceanic experience” of Sweetlick Beach becomes one of total absorption—a world consumed, while the self remains at its center.
English translation of the handwritten piece on the right:
Welcome to Sweetlick Beach.
Here, no scent of salt or seaweed drifts through the air. Instead, you’re enveloped by the sweet, heavy aroma of caramelized sugar. The sea is a primal force—its waves can swallow you mercilessly, indifferently.
But this brightly colored beach, you are the one who devours it, who makes it part of yourself!
Here, no scent of salt or seaweed drifts through the air. Instead, you’re enveloped by the sweet, heavy aroma of caramelized sugar. The sea is a primal force—its waves can swallow you mercilessly, indifferently.
But this brightly colored beach, you are the one who devours it, who makes it part of yourself!
The candy shells await your tongue, greedy for your touch. Only when moistened by your saliva does the full shine of their sugar mass unfold—more dazzling than the glittering sea in sunlight.
Lick the shells until the blood from your tongue mingles with the sugar. From this delicious fusion, Venus, the goddess of candy shells, is born. Like a sticky embryo, she rises from her scallop shell.
Lick the shells until the blood from your tongue mingles with the sugar. From this delicious fusion, Venus, the goddess of candy shells, is born. Like a sticky embryo, she rises from her scallop shell.
Elsewhere, oil clings to the coasts of the seas. At the Sweetlick Beach, the only sticky substance is sugar—and it coats everything. The gull’s feathers have long since blown away, its flesh carried off by the waves, even its cartilage dissolved. Where its body once was, its skeleton now gleams beneath an amber glaze of sugar.
Death can do nothing to you when coated in sugar. You simply consume it, like everything else. The sea gives, the sea takes. At the Sweetlick Beach, this phrase decays into empty, glittering words on the waves.
Here, everything becomes just one eternal moment of sugary ecstasy.
Lay down your disgust and surrender to the oceanic experience. Let the boundaries between yourself and the world dissolve in sweet delight.
Here, everything becomes just one eternal moment of sugary ecstasy.
Lay down your disgust and surrender to the oceanic experience. Let the boundaries between yourself and the world dissolve in sweet delight.
Willkommen am Schleckstrand
2025
Installation
Dimensions variable
Painting: 83 x 132.5 cm, text on Cardboard: 153 x 50,5 cm, objects various sizes
Materials: Sugar, sand, seashells, cardboard, acrylic paint
The work is conceived as an immersive installation and has not yet been realized. The images show the individual parts that are intended to be brought together in the exhibition space.
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