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*Berlin Completed a BA Fine Art 2003 at Reading Uni Lives in the UK I remember being quite young, downing a bowl of oatmeal. My mother sat at the corner of the breakfast table, her chin in her palm, gazing intently down at me. "What?" I asked, spoon in mid-air. "Nothing," she said, pulling herself up. "It's just that when you love someone, you love to watch them eat." I thought about this, and in my basic, 6-year-old way I first understood that as what I ate diminished, I myself increased, and that love made that OK. Nothing lost. Love meant having a witness. Later I came to understand this sort of spilling, bridging preservation to be true of time, and by extension of painting, and by extension, everything.
In Katrin Mäurich's painting, the constituent, often disparate parts that go into making her imagery eat at one another, at once diminishing and increasing one another. Empathic color and discerning drawing nibble away at one another's edges, as do her painting's lateral compositions and their frontal presence, as well the duration of her painting's influence and the immediacy of its impact. Her painting as an event eats away at her painting as an object, and happens then in reverse, verb and noun spilling into each other. In no single aspect of Mäurich's vernacular is this ingestive dynamic more evident, and more individuated, than in the shape of her supports. The chassis of her painting pushes out along with her imagery, like a corona, only to implode and crimp under the weight of the environment, only to push out again, sometimes at an oblique, sometimes with torque, but always persistent. In one way they are like shields; in another like heartbeats. Painting is a perennial address continually reinventing itself. The questions are the same. The answers change. The questions and answers eat away at each other. Mäurich's paintings evidence the essential sustenance of this exchange. Nothing? My mother might as well have answered when I asked what, "It's just everything". George Lawson is the owner of George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco
http://www.georgelawsongallery.com/ |
The intuition - is it something deeper even than that? - the conjecture, so strangely resistant to falsification, that there is otherness' out of reach gives to our elemental existence its pulse of unfulfillment. We are the creatures of a great thirst. Bent on coming home to a place we have never known.
(George Steiner) Perhaps we could define poetry by contrasting it with prose; except in cases like Joyce, poetry is always what cannot be sold, or what does not sell. It doesn't narrate anything; it has no usefulness or it is merely useful in its uselessness, through the ethical and aesthetic awareness that results from it. Poetry and experimental poetry in particular, which sustains this awareness most radically, is what remains of a genre that has almost disappeared from the human race. It holds out in a world where people are tending to lose all the spiritual values in favour of practical predatory goals. (Augusto de Campos) |
katrin mäurich
