Christine Streuli

Mostra personale della pittrice svizzera Christine Streuli (*1975 Bern).

Comunicato stampa

Monica De Cardenas Gallery in Zuoz is pleased to announce an exhibition by Swiss painter Christine Streuli (*1975 Bern).
Christine Streuli draws inspiration for her pictures from a never-ending fund of visual objects that are freely available to her for her art: this includes paintings from the European and Western art tradition in which she is well versed, as well as figurines, ornaments, decorations and patterns from the non-European treasure-trove of pictures; discoveries in her ordinary environment also belong to this repertoire, such as representations in advertising, screen-savers or herbariums.
The artist’s freedom lies first and foremost in her choice of inception and the pictorial elements that she seeks to transform via art in her new pictures, and far less in the freedom of art as execution or even expression. The starting point for her art is always a reaction to visual stimuli, often existing pictures or those that have caught her notice, which are usually transferred to her picture backgrounds via templates of one form or another. The point of departure for the creation of a new picture must therefore be understood in its widest sense: it can often be the case that the artist does not find the precursor to her image in an existing picture outside her own art, but that she discovers a suitable concept for a new painting in the free structure of the grounding of a canvas that has perhaps lain patiently in the studio for weeks waiting for an image to develop from it.
Streuli stopped painting with oil paints and brushes while studying art in Berlin. She wanted to work faster, in a more agile and direct way that would allow a certain speed and clarity, with layers of clear color, sharp outlines and drafts well defined. She began to draw simple shapes transferring, cropping them with a cutter and covering them with a palette knife and acrylic paints, lacquers, that dry quickly or by spraying spray paint. The intention in her work is to make form become content through painting.
In the last years Christine Streuli has been living in Berlin, London and New York. In 2007 she represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale and exhibited at Kunsthaus Lagenthal, in 2008 at Kunsthaus Aarau and ArtUnlimited in Basel; in 2009 at Kunstverein Oldenburg, in 2010 at the Marta Herford Museum in Herford, Germany. In the Summer of 2012 she is going to have a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Bern.

Abel Auer’s paintings and drawings are often framed by arabesque-like ornamental motifs. Executed meticulously in Indian ink or with a brush, these motifs not only form an elaborate border around the image, but are also recurrent elements in the artist’s figurative repertory that possesses a narrative depth imbued with mystery. Auer’s iconographic universe is imprinted on the landscape – mountains, coniferous forests, rocks, plant forms. Figures and architecture also appear, however, and their surreal quality places his painting in the dimension of a timeless present, while often creating a strange feeling of visionary rapture.
Echoes of Romantic art are to be found in Auer’s works, along with citations of other painters – like the Belgian James Ensor – manifold references to popular culture and allusions to fantastic cinema, the comic-strip repertoire and sci-fi novels.
Auer has chosen to take a critical distance from those artistic schools advocating objectification or a pseudo-theoretical approach. He creates alternative worlds whose wholeness and beauty “function” in a completely autonomous way. Postmodern criticism, humour and irony overlap against a background of melancholy playfulness, in a graphic and pictorial output that also seems linked to writers such as Charles Baudelaire or Edgar Allan Poe.
Abel Auer (*1974 Hamburg) attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg at the end of the 1990s and was one of the founders of the Akademie Isotrop group consisting of 20 young artists (1996–2000).