Migraine portraits

Ongoing Series

This series depicts heads - or rather, what rages, flickers, and surges within them.

Each work is a portrait, but without a face in the classical sense. There are no eyes, no hairstyles, no clear gender. Only forms, lines, and color spaces. And a hint of pain. I call them Migraine Portraits.

Each canvas, each sheet of paper tells of a moment in the midst of an attack - or of what life with chronic migraine feels like: as if one's own head were becoming a landscape. A volcanic crater. A storm. A throbbing, too-tight shell. Or a seething interior that expresses itself in color, texture, and material.

Some works I create in acrylic and texture paste, others in watercolor or gouache. I often add elements: embroidered lines, dried seaweed, broken shells, scraps of foil, yarn, or tiny figurations. They suggest inner states - of withdrawal, overstimulation, and dissociation.

One image shows colorful fish swimming through a chaos of shattered shapes. Another lets colors spill out in all directions - as if the head were screaming. There are powerful compositions in deep blue, dark red, gold, and black - and others that appear lighter, in shades of green and pastel, interspersed with airy white. No two migraine conditions are the same. No two heads are the same. No two days are the same.

The series is an expression of my search for a visual language for something that usually eludes the visible - and at the same time, an invitation to rethink pain, function, and identity.

Because chronic illness is not just a medical phenomenon. It is experience, form, resistance. And sometimes art.

The portrait "Blooming Headspace" visualizes the migraine of Anni, who talks about her life with chronic migraines on her Instagram account "Migräne Du Arsch"