CLAUDIA HIRTL

Claudia Hirtl’s art is situated along borderlines without accepting borders; it crosses through western and eastern modes of thought trying to contextualise and comprehend one through the other; it applies Hirtl’s own form of Nihonga to large-format and/or multiple-panel canvases; it incorporates Japanese ideograms, kanji, into western abstraction; it playfully adopts the graphic strokes of ideograms and transforms the scriptural sign into an image, which in turn consciously dissolves the signifier and thus the meaning of the sign; and her art has the western viewer encounter an alluring enigma prompting a desire for deciphering, but being able to ‘read’ the ideogram will not help. Identifying the sign does not mean you understand the sign.

Hirtl’s paintings demand a viewer’s concentration and his or her letting go of habitual patterns of perception; they transform the canvas into a visual prompt for meditation; they give colour to transcendence, and they offer the viewer the experience of the sublime.