17/06/2026
artwork of the week
artist: Alice Dittmar
title: Moon ,13.11.2021
year: 2025
material: Ballpoint pen on Alu-Dibond photo print, framed
size: 21 x 29,5 cm
price: 1500 €
Alice Dittmar's work combines photography and drawing into something entirely its own – a process as time-consuming as it is precise. Using a ballpoint pen, the artist covers the entire surface of the photograph with small, dense strokes. This fine hatching settles over the motif like a filigree web, lending the smooth photographic surface an unexpected, haptic depth.
The image shows a nocturnal scene above Berlin. In the right centre, the moon glows softly through cloud cover; in the lower left, the television tower traces itself faintly – a vertical, luminous structure, barely more than a sign. The palette shifts from deep, almost impenetrable black in the upper half to warm copper and brown tones below. The moonlight is broken and filtered through the fine network of lines – it holds its own, but quietly.
What Dittmar does with this method is profoundly temporal: every stroke is a movement, a decision. The photograph – by definition a fraction of a second – is transformed through hours of manual work into something slow. The camera captures; the hand lingers. From a fleeting moment, something lasting is made.
Date and place are part of the title – not as incidental information, but as a statement: this is no arbitrary moon. It is this moon, on this evening, seen from here.
In cooperation with spectreunion
Instagram subscribers receive free shipping on this artwork (until the next artwork of the week).
dittmar