it is the essence — the soul — that intrigues me.«

Carl-Nikolas von Tiedemann is a classical draughtsman and painter born in 2000 in Hamburg, Germany.

Having already expressed a heightened interest in art at a young age, Carl-Nikolas began attending various privately taught classes in drawing and painting early in his life, which eventually led him to study with August Ohm at the Atelier Ohm during his teens, making him the artist’s youngest student to date. After graduating from high school with a focus on aesthetics and briefly working for one of Hamburg’s foremost art galleries, he enrolled at the prestigious Florence Academy of Art in Italy in 2019, where he completed his three-year long studies and earned his diploma in late 2022.

In his studio located in the historic centre of Florence, only a few steps away from the church of Santa Croce, Carl-Nikolas works with a constant eye on the old masters, particularly the great artists of the Baroque, such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Ribera. While primarily focussing on the genres of figurative and still life painting, he draws most of his inspiration from music, literature, and not least of all the beauty that surrounds him. In his practice he continuously seeks to connect to the past through the traditional materials he works with and by following classical methods that have been applied for centuries. His carefully crafted oil paintings are defined by a striking chiaroscuro, enveloping his subjects in a golden light and making them glow off the canvas with a real sense of plasticity. They consist of many layers, some opaque, others transparent, rendering a lifelike representation of his subject matter. With the figurative work in his oeuvre he strives to express our shared humanity and the internal conflicts playing out within every individual.

»I want to create visual poems. With every painting I hope to eternalize a soul on the canvas, partly my own, partly that of my model. Once there is a real feeling of presence in the picture, a sense of calm melancholy as well as some internalized drama, I know that I can let go of it.«

Carl-Nikolas was a studio assistant at the Florence Academy of Art during his student days and went on to become a principal instructor at the Florence Art Studio from 2023 to 2024, until he began to offer private tuition in his personal studio and to teach occasional workshops within Italy as well as abroad. Firmly believing in the power of observational learning, he gives his students the opportunity to immerse themselves in intensive studies of drawing and painting from life right alongside him, while he creates his own work. Furthermore, he is regularly taking on commissions, first and foremost in the field of portraiture. His drawings and paintings can be found in private and public collections across Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia. In his spare time he enjoys reading, writing, and taking long walks through the rolling hills of Tuscany surrounding his hometown of choice, the birthplace of the Renaissance, Florence.