Maria Brunner

The Triumph of Painting

From the winter-rainfall regions of South Africa comes the plant of the genus Hippeastrum, commonly known as the amaryllis, which enjoys great popularity in Germany because its flowering promises us spring while it is still winter. Maria Brunner, born in Lienz in Austria in 1962 and living today in Berlin, devoted an entire cycle of small-format oil paintings to the amaryllis in 2014. Alongside these, this first comprehensive publication on the oil paintings of recent years, painted with great virtuosity, presents a series of large-format canvases of cloths floating in the air from 2015 as well as small felt-tip pen drawings folded from glassine paper from 2016. Maria Brunner’s work has always been marked by a profound doubt as to whether things are as they seem. Her oil paintings have nothing to do with the hyperrealism of a Franz Gertsch or a Chuck Close, nor is her subject a disappearance, a blurring or the fleeting real moment of a snapshot as in Gerhard Richter. Since the collage-like oil works of around 2010 she has been moving, in her interrogation of surface stimuli, towards the depiction of a single object. At first, for the collages, it may still be said: the heart has no knees, and the nose is neither a cucumber nor a biscuit. Whereas of her depictions of amaryllis or of floating cloths it must now be said: what on earth does that remind one of? Several factors are at play here with the viewer: Maria Brunner’s works aim at an overwhelming effect in the painted detail; they draw on a knowledge of chiaroscuro in the backgrounds and push it with the opposite effect, sfumato, and hyperrealism never stands a chance. It may sound audacious, but here an entirely new magic realism celebrates its premiere!