DOMINIQUE FOERTIG THE PERSON BEHIND THE MUNCHIES ART CLUB
You know how Obelix fell into a magic potion when he was a child? well, something kind of like that happened to me. When I was a child, I grew up among so many gifted Artists on a small island in Greece called Hydra.
One of the most beautiful places in the world where over the years all kinds of artists came and went, a place so full of incredible history, it was as if I like Obelix had fallen into a magic potion, in my case the magic potion of art and beauty.
All this wonder was a part of my everydayness growing up.
Painting, making, writing, building, cooking, it all came easy to me. It was never one given gift, it was a concoction of a thousand things. The influences on this small Island never ending, coming from every one and everything.
WHY THE MUNCHIES ART CLUB?
During my formative years, the web did not exist and it took a long while before I bought my first computer. My computers, for I have had a few over the years, have always been part of making my every day life easier, and also it has opened new horizons to the never ending.
The past years I have been exploring the possibilities beyond the physical limitations of the traditional art world, globally and in a sustainable way.
I don't want to replace the traditional galleries but rather function as an extension.
The space I am building must be understood as an additional means for galleries to present exhibitions, form collaborations, and build community on a parallel plane.
I am building a space where you can also learn more about the artist, not just a biography in the classic sense, but insight to what they think and what makes them tick.
An art platform for everyone, for you, for the artist, for the gallery, the collector, and for others like me, who like it simple and amiable.
ON HYDRA ISLAND | SO MANY INFLUENCES
There was my mothers stylish house, filled with beautiful objects - linen with intricate laced borders, paintings from artists she had collected over the years, later the art work from my step father Spanish photographer Antonio Girbes. The house covered by the pink and green color of our huge bougainvillea, listening to the sounds of Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen, drinking ice cold coca-cola, watching pink petals fall on the white washed stone floors, all that artistry inspired me for life.
There were the neighboring older women all dressed in black, who adored me the blond foreigner who spoke their language like their own. They would cook complicated intricate food, teaching me to cook with my soul, so over the years, their way of cooking became mine.
The Opera music that echoes through my memories, it then echoed through the neighborhood when you climbed the steep hill to Susi's white washed house. There, Susi my mother and I would sit watching the sun slowly set, whilst eating chilled cucumber soup listening to Vivaldi. The walls of her house were also covered from many a talented artists work, thank you gifts for her never-ending generous hospitality to them all.
As a child I was also inspired by our neighbor the carpenter Yiannis, whose rugged hands would guide me over the wooden door he had just sanded down. Around us the smell of wood, dusty and musty and lovely.
Leonard Cohen walked by my window every day when he headed for the harbor, to sit at a cafe and catch up with old friends. Leonard Cohen discovered Hydra in the early '60s and bought a house there from the money he had inherited from his Grandmother.
At the time it was a house with no electricity nor running water, but he fixed it up over the years, and now his children spend their summers there with their children.
Famous American artist Brice Marden, and his beautiful family also bought a house there in the early ́70s. Writers and Poets sat with us on wooden tables at the three brothers and spoke of love, life and politics, getting more passionate the later it got and the more retsina flowed.
Over the years, the Island has and hasn't changed. it just seems to adapt to the needs of every generation. So I guess it's pretty normal for me to move in the art world. My husband is the brilliant Austrian artist Ernst Koslitsch.
After years of doing all kinds of things, learning, growing and changing, the most obvious next project was to do something more involved with the arts and my friends.
So here I am, doing what I love, helping all my wonderfully talented artists reach the success they truly deserve.
I am their guide, their mentor, their friend and together with them, building the munchies art club into a place where dreams can come true.
It's also a journey connecting with new people, like minded creatives who believe in change and do not want to go alone, but together forming alliances that can last a life time.