Laura Mercedes Arndt (born 1999 in Ribnitz-Damgarten) lives and works in Berlin. She studied painting at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee and completed her masterclass studies with Pia Linz in the summer of 2025. In 2024, she was awarded the first prize of museum FLUXUS+studis and presented her first solo exhibition at galerie burster, Berlin.
Her work has been shown at museum FLUXUS+ in Potsdam, at Künstlerhaus Bethanien and at the POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair, NADA New York, among other venues.
The bodies that Laura Mercedes Arndt brings together on her canvases are robust and impressive in their stature, almost sculptural. Yet their colour and texture remain soft, the skin earthy and warm, a blend of delicate pinks and browns. Naked, save for simple white underwear, they reveal an intimate, vulnerable, yet innocently playful side. Despite their nudity in the midst of the body hubbub, there is no erotic connotation. Instead, their physical similarity to one another stands out. By replicating and varying the same figure—sometimes with long hair, sometimes with a short haircut—the artist deftly avoids any clear attribution of sexual identity. At the heart of the painting lies the quiet strength that emanates from these figures. Each body is distinctly outlined, yet there is a palpable yearning in the air to transcend solitude, to merge into a collective body, to connect and fuse into a unified whole.