Franziska Maderthaner - exhibition in the Rothamel Gallery
- Written by Portal Editor
Franziska Maderthaner interweaves representational and abstract painting. She masters her medium with virtuosity. She uses quotes from art history in her paintings with pleasure and knowledge.
Conversely, she treats contemporary themes with baroque opulence and rococo sophistication.
We cordially invite you and your friends to our Erfurt gallery for the opening with the artist on Saturday, March 15th at 8 p.m.
Rothamel Gallery Erfurt
March 15th to May 17th, 2025 | March 15 to May 17, 2025
Franziska Maderthaner - associate professor of painting and graphics
Franziska Maderthaner attended the Academic Gymnasium in Vienna from 1972 to 1980. From 1980 to 1985 she studied art education under Herbert Tasquil at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
She completed her studies with the written diploma thesis "Free International University. Attempt to objectify the organ for social sculpture by Joseph Beuys." From 1985 to 1986 she studied graphic art under Oswald Oberhuber. From June 1984 to March 1985 she was Martin Kippenberger's assistant.
She has been taking part in exhibitions since 1984. After her studies she worked as a freelancer on various film projects and theatre productions. Since 2000 she has been an associate professor for painting and graphic art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
From 2004 to 2006 she was chairwoman of the IG Bildende Kunst in Austria.
In her paintings Maderthaner interweaves representational and abstract expressionist elements. Bodies, still life’s and objects or scenes from everyday culture emerge from her pouring of paint and radical painting gestures.
Abstraction and representationalism do not exclude each other in her art, but complement and support each other in a wide variety of ways. She often and happily uses quotations from the history of painting.
Other of her works only supposedly represent art history, but are "reenactments", living historical role plays of today. She masters her medium with virtuosity. She likes to use quotations from art history in her paintings and with knowledge. Conversely, she treats contemporary themes with baroque opulence and rococo-like sophistication.
Caravaggio, Tiepolo and Dutch baroque painters' quotations are also mixed with current imagery and grow out of the amorphous colour worlds.
Who has never thought of gray
The series "Who never painted gray..." is inspired by Peter Sloterdijk's book "Who has never thought of gray - A theory of colours", published in 2022.
As long as you haven't painted grey, Paul Cezanne once said, you are not a painter.
A sentence that Franziska Maderthaner sees as a challenge and a task: Grey as a metaphor, as an indicator of mood and as a sign of political and moral ambiguity - according to the philosopher, for the painter, grey is the mixture of all colours, a kind of waste colour.
It is also the grey that Gerhard Richter describes as neutral or without tendency
These pictures are broken up and complemented in various grey, black and white mixtures in abstract gestures by highly dramatic bodies of young people who roll around in grey mud or smear themselves with it.
The desolation of the non-colour grey is thus in contrast to the party atmosphere and pleasurable hedonism of "Mud Festivals".
They also evoke associations with Viennese Actionism, only with the opposite sign.
Whereas in Vienna in the 1960s women were still abused as models for paint pouring, Maderthaner's female bodies are self-determined and full of zest for life.
"Ennuinale" refers to the French word "ennui" - boredom. A bored, sleeping young woman in a sea of colorful paint pouring and geometric shapes with a golden picture frame.
A reaction to this year's Venice Biennale, which raised ethno-kitsch from the Third World to the pedestal of art in bright colors. Maderthaner was so bored there that this work can be understood as a reaction or as the state of current institutional art. Boredom in bright colors...
The picture - Touchez moi!" could also be counted as part of the "who never painted grey" series.
Here 2 hands are painted black and white, so not blackfacing but black handing (?) or white handing. Hands in painting represent something like the supreme discipline of the arts.
So clearly legible in their expressiveness, so difficult to implement in painting, but above all the idea that AI cannot implement this complex part called the hand is interesting. A challenge.
"White young man defines himself as a tulip" addresses the current identity debate.
In other pictures by Franziska Maderthaner, art historical quotes are reinterpreted, tulips and grapes, sculptures and folds are painted and fascinatingly embedded in radical painting gestures.
Galerie Rothamel Erfurt
March 15 to May 17, 2025 | March 15 to May 17, 2025
Please also read: