Painting
Franziska Maderthaner

We cordially invite you and your friends to the opening with the artist on Saturday, March 15 at 8 pm in our Erfurt gallery.
 
Franziska Maderthaner interweaves figurative and abstract painting. She has a virtuoso command of her medium. She uses quotes from art history in her paintings with pleasure and knowledge. Conversely, she treats contemporary themes with baroque opulence and rococo sophistication.
 
The series “Who never painted grey...” is inspired by Peter Sloterdijk's book “Wer noch kein Grau gedacht hat - Eine Farbenlehre”, published in 2022. Paul Cezanne once said that as long as you have not painted gray, 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 display of political and moral ambiguity - according to the philosopher, for the painter it is the mixture of all colors, a waste color, so to speak. It is also the gray to which Gerhard Richter ascribes the attribute neutral, or without tendency.
 
These images are broken up and supplemented in various mixtures of gray, black and white in abstract gestures by highly dramatic bodies of young people rolling in or smearing themselves with gray mud. The desolation of the non-color grey thus contrasts with the party atmosphere and lustful hedonism of “Mud Festivals”. They also evoke associations with Viennese Actionism, only in reverse. Whereas in Vienna in the 1960s, women were still abused as models for paint pours, Maderthaner's female bodies are self-determined and full of joie de vivre.
 
“Ennuinale” refers to the French word ‘ennui’ - boredom. A bored, sleeping young woman in a sea of colorful piles of paint and geometric shapes in a golden picture frame. A reaction to this year's Venice Biennale, which elevated ethnic 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 a state of current institutional art. Boredom in bright colors...
 
The painting “Touchez moi!” could also be considered part of the “who never painted gray” series. Here 2 hands are painted black and white, i.e. not blackfacing but black handing (?) or white handing.
Hands in painting represent something like the supreme discipline of the art of representation. So clearly legible in their expressive power, so difficult to realize in painting, but above all the idea that AI cannot realize this complex part called hand is interesting. A challenge.
 
“White young man defines himself as a tulip” addresses the current identity debate.
In other paintings by Franziska Maderthaner, art historical quotations are reinterpreted, tulips and grapes, sculptures and folds are painted and fascinatingly embedded in radical painting gestures.
 
Franziska Maderthaner attended the Akademisches 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 “Freie Internationale Universität. An attempt to objectify the organ for the social sculpture of Joseph Beuys.” From 1985 to 1986 she studied graphic art with Oswald Oberhuber. From June 1984 to March 1985 she was assistant to Martin Kippenberger. She has participated in exhibitions since 1984. After graduating, she worked as a freelancer on various film projects and theater productions. Since 2000, she has been an associate professor of painting and graphics at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. From 2004 to 2006 she was chairwoman of the IG Bildende Kunst in Austria.