The basic class is the common artistic orientation year, for all students of Liberal Arts as well as for students of Art for Secondary School Teachers, in which the students study in the first and second semesters of the bachelor’s program.
Through exercises and assignments, students are introduced to process-based continuity in the studio setting. Here, investigations are offered to articulate themselves with drawing, color, three-dimensional and technically generated pictorial means, as well as with performative actions and other time-based methods.
These experimental arrangements are intended to sensitize and enable students to formulate independent pictorial questions in parallel. Students are expected to constantly develop these in an independent manner. All means, media and techniques are permitted. Everything is possible, there are no limits to the joy of experimentation.
For this development, the students have their own workspace in the basic rooms as well as a project room at their disposal, which allows them to install their work in a spatial context and thus to experience it detached from “background noise”.

In addition, presentations of the work steps and reflections on them – in the plenum and in individual discussions – form a further constant in the base year. Here, the questions are pursued as to the intellectual origin and intention of the respective artistic production and what actual effects are achieved.

In addition to continuity in artistic practice, students are introduced to changing trends in contemporary art through informational sessions. Here, during field trips and via slide lectures, instructors present thematic spectrums such as: Aspects of drawing, color as a material and in painting, form and sculpture in space, photography of the present, installation, sound and video art, and performative and time-based approaches to work. In addition, students have access to an internal – constantly expanding – basic database (INFO – TAKE) with cinematic artist portraits and statements that allow them to independently explore individual artistic attitudes of the present.

The basic class sees itself as a school of seeing, which should enable students to learn to distinguish artistic qualities, to recognize them and to be able to name them on the basis of their own and other artistic productions. This ability, evidenced by the works produced in the basic year, should open the way for students to continue their studies in specialized classes.

After the basic class (starting in the third bachelor’s semester), students then study in the respective specialized classes (Sculpture/Film/Graphics/Ceramics/Painting/Media/Interdisciplinary Artistic Practice).