Galerie Filser & Gräf

For Christa Filser, the search for new forms of expression plays an important role in her artistic work. Her artistic activity reflects her search for sound, complexity, differentiation and challenge. Knowledge, experience, intuition and creativity in a constantly evolving and changing process find their way into the design and expression of her art. Materials enter into action and reaction with each other and contribute their part to the creation of the surface structure. The artist captures a world seen with her inner eye, which threatens to slip away from us more and more, and constantly questions it.
The works on paper and collages are transformed into an abstract, harmonious collection of patterns, colors and lines. They take a position on current events with subtle metaphors. In addition, the artist confronts us forcefully with the existence of the Other through her painted and collaged portraits. The face appears as the membrane that enables the exchange between an "inside", however conceived, and the "outside".

Transformative landscapes, shaped by constructed brushstrokes, draw the eye to motifs from apparent nature. In doing so, she reveals new, lively patterns that can be perceived in a variety of ways. She breaks through the supposedly disordered informality by sculpturally processing fragments and collages. This results in landscapes and organic forms that are technically interwoven.

Some of her works bear the term "NODI" in the title, which emphasizes the dialogue with nature. "Nodi" refers to the knots on plants from which new stems and leaves develop. These knots illustrate the striving for light and the process of photosynthesis. The artist adds small descriptive elements to the title, which are reflected within the pictures, such as "Przellangrün", "Tortenblau" or "Ernussrot". These poetic titles, which evoke images, also build a bridge to figuration.

Johanna Flammer creates forms that are reminiscent of nature and landscape, but are hardly comparable. Staggered tectonic structures emerge in a painterly climax. It is an interplay of hair and landscapes, of photography and imagination. The result is a surreal landscape that moves between abstraction and nature. (Excerpt from the text by Wilke Austermann)

Hirofumi Fujiwara's naturalistic, anthropomorphic sculptures evoke the question of how our perception reacts to the form that is most familiar to us, namely the human image. His sculptures are not depictions of individuals with characteristic features. Ethereal, almost sexless, but haunting in their silent presence, they appeal to aspects of familiarity and strangeness at the same time. The unfathomable nature of the human being, which offers an unlimited number of possible interpretations, is the reason for the artist's exploration of figurative representation. For this fact leaves the way Hirofumi Fujiwara's figures are seen entirely in the eye of the beholder. Everyone, depending on their own viewing habits, cultural influences and world views, will believe they recognize their own in this aesthetic example of man. (Tinatin Ghughunishvili-Brück, curator & art historian)

Sebastian Herzau is always on the lookout for new challenges in classical painting techniques. He mainly devotes himself to the traditional genres of portraits and still lifes, which he translates into his own artistic signature. He creates illusions in the sense of trompe-l'œil painting and ambiguous pictorial worlds that reveal his experimental curiosity. He often gives them a special touch of "Herzau humor", as in the paintings "Still Life Abstract", "Potato Salad is Out!" or "Contemporary Ceiling Painting", which make the viewer smile.

The artist has also been working for years on his series of works "tgb. the great below". It is important to him to stimulate the process of perception and possibly to explore or create a voyeuristic, mysterious feeling. What is hidden behind it? What is real and illusion?

The fluorescent paint not only serves as an eye-catching signal color, but the viewer is even encouraged by a small black light flashlight to interact with the portrait and make the color glow in the dark, creating another level of perception.

Tobias Stutz does not emphasize the inaccessibility of buildings that have become museum-like. Instead, he pays tribute to the original concept of the Bauhaus - architecture as a reflection of life and the creation of a homely environment for each individual. In his condensed presentation, focusing on form and color, Tobias Stutz not only illustrates the principle of "less is more" in a tangible way, but also visualizes the fundamental idea of the Bauhaus. Similar to this movement, there is nothing superfluous in Tobias Stutz's works: a few lines and surfaces create an image that is structured by clear horizontal and vertical elements and occasionally interrupted by diagonal lines. Although his paintings appear three-dimensional, the world they depict seems to project into our own. Access to the architecture he depicts is not through doors, but through windows, which act as a kind of window to the soul of the building in question. The diversity of Bauhaus architectural styles is thus individualized, and we view them as if they represented feelings generated by the architecture for its viewers or inhabitants. The person for whom these buildings were created is not physically present in the artist's works. Nothing distracts from our view of the building, which is nevertheless indirectly filled with life: its absence is simultaneously a presence, as we are looking at its home. The architectures depicted by Tobias Stutz are reflections of his life, inhabited living environments. (Dr. Andrea Lechner, art historian & curator)

In Maria Wallenstål-Schoenberg's paintings, color tones emerge that interact rhythmically as in a piece of music. Lower layers of color swing forward, disappear again to present themselves in a new way elsewhere. Color fields relate to each other, forms come into contact at their edges, picture edges tell their own stories. The color value is literally constituted in its own vital liveliness, resulting from its enhancing, invigorating undertones. The expulsion of a color value through modulating layering as a painting process gives the color an active role. It literally grows out of itself, actively shaping its color power. Similar to the medieval changeant or the three-stage color modulation - according to light, middle and shadow value - the increased beauty value of a hue arises from temperature and brightness-related or neighboring hue variants, which are superimposed here like glazes.
Inspired by artists such as Johannes Itten, Barnett Newman and Joan Mitchell, the artist has created a body of work in recent years that is of international significance.