Proceeding from a formally unconventional practice of cutting and mounting the nettle fabric on which she paints, Lotte Maiwald creates hybrid pictorial works between disassembled or folded painting, banner, and textile wall installation. Her luminous paintings, carefully executed on these subtly sculptural substrates, negotiate being-in-the-world as a non-self-evident condition. The painter's lucid landscapes point to a surrealist-tinged interrogation of the world that re-examines the liminal zone between dream and tangible truth, historically defined by psychoanalysis and psychedelia, through the lens of a technologically-infused, 21st-century-altered understanding of reality.
Read MoreRadiant skies, pristine meadows, and uncluttered lakeside vistas impart a seemingly metaphysical and supra-temporal clarity – as apparently internal worlds projected outwards, while sometimes incorporating such profoundly specific, external objects as solar-powered surveillance cameras. Landscapes and solitary figures constitute one another in Maiwald's imagery, and in doing so amount to the most succinct formula for world-building.
The scenarios Maiwald constellates from a few concentrated figures and depicted motifs, as simple as they are ominous, are repeatedly given over to sensual abstraction, adrift in the predominant, vibrant colour and surface compositions in which they are inscribed.
The questions arising from the figures find an answer in their own visual character: the world is a picture, in the sense of an illogically, elegantly structured cosmic framework, overlaid by black or fiery-red, keystone-esque slices of sky. More elemental than the landscapes of René Magritte or David Hockney, of which they are reminiscent, Maiwald's paintings reveal themselves as sections of an infinitely expanding cosmos. This character of her skies and horizons – their assertion of vastness that transcends the bounds of the image – is echoed in the unstretched mounting of their nettle fabric substrates, which fray slightly at the edges. Waves and folds in the fabric are occasionally determinative as well. Maiwald shares with Rosemary Mayer or Vivian Suter a feminist sensibility for the connectedness-to-the-world – that is, the materiality and temporality – of artistic artefacts. Her paintings always tell their own story as a vulnerable object susceptible to external influences, and turn this dimension into an aspect of subversive performance and an artistic approach that finds graceful lightness in sustainable strategies.
Courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf.
