Artist Statement
It's about dreams, wishing not to dream as much for at least one night.
It’s about losing.
About interiors, being stuck in a room.
It’s about which place to call home.
It’s about bodies and the perception of one’s body, the idealization of certain body types.
And about deforming limbs.
It’s the most personal narrative.
It’s about self.
And women.
My paintings are processing life, the past and the present. They are large scale self-portraits, sometimes based on Christian and mythological iconography. When starting a painting, I try to reconstruct a certain situation in my life, re-create a dream, relive my memories and visualize them from a third person perspective. The narrative I create rarely includes more than two figures and most often one figure being situated in a tight interior, squished to the wall and ceiling, being restricted, not only architecturally but also physically by their stiff, strong and heavy bodies. My portraits focus mostly on the female body and the history of its depiction, pointing out the male gaze and long-established visual perceptions. The female bodies in my paintings become more and more muscular and I depict them larger than life. That way, they can occupy a whole room, they are present, more than I am most of the time and they reveal the discrepancy between physical and psychological strength and reverse stereotypes. In painting nudes and relating meat and flesh, topics of life, death and vanity are tackled. My paintings, which in exhibitions give the recipient the feeling of entering a candy store at first glance, are really quite uncomfortable at second glance. I use bright colors and I have a very meticulous way of painting neat, print-like surfaces to conflict with dark subject matters.
