Two chairs – two seats, facing each other or side by side, depending on how you arrange them. For us, they stand for the two lives that many artists carry: their creative practice and everything else that shaped them before it, or alongside it.

2chairs artspace was founded in Berlin in 2020 by artist and curator Lena Ash. It began, quite literally, as a conversation: a series of interviews with artists who had come to their practice from other fields – science, law, engineering, finance, education, and more. People whose path to art was not straightforward, and who rarely spoke publicly about the road that had brought them there.

Some of them left their first career behind. Others still carry both, moving between identities and negotiating time, money, and the question of what it means to call yourself an artist. There is no single story here. But there is a shared experience: the feeling of sitting between two chairs, and the silence that often surrounds it.

We believe that silence is worth breaking. Almost every artist has a life beyond the studio. 2chairs is a space where that life is part of the work, the context, and the conversation.

Since 2020, we have presented the work of more than 20 artists through solo exhibitions paired with in-depth interviews – each project is at once a display and a dialogue. We have participated in Berlin’s cultural program, including 48 Stunden Neukölln and Art Spring Festival, and have received support from the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin, as well as the federal Kreativ-Transfer program. In 2023, we registered as a nonprofit association –2chairs artspace e.V. – and continue to grow as an independent, nomadic project space.