The artists Franziska Meinert and Christa Filser both work with the medium of paper in very different ways. They also question “appearance and reality” within the boundaries of reality. In doing so, they embark on fictional narrative threads that take the viewer into familiar and new worlds.
Franziska Meinert works with different techniques and media: photography, drawing, painting, film and sculpture, as in her series “Icons of Art”. Using papier-mâché and paint, the artist creates images, or rather characters, of artists who have shaped and defined contemporary history.
Franziska Meinert’s sculptures blossom vividly in the viewer’s mind’s eye thanks to the unmistakable attributes associated with individual artists and the amazingly detailed facial features.
But Franziska Meinert is not interested in creating a “likeness”. Rather, it is the model-like quality that appeals to her. And so the material of paper always remains tangible and recognizable. The deceased artists portrayed have found a permanent place in the history of art. Franziska Meinert now lifts these icons onto pedestals as miniature cabinets with a shelf perspective.
Eine weitere erstaunliche Serie der Künstlerin sind Ihre Fotografien der „Filling Rooms, White Spaces“. Die Fotografien zeigen Modellräume von „white cubes“. Diese sind jedoch von der Künstlerin fiktive konzipierte Ausstellungsflächen, in die hinein Fotografien platziert wurden, die wiederum Modelle zeigen, welche in unterschiedlichen Kontexten Verwendung finden. Es werden Modelle konstruiert, die potentielle Räume eröffnen. Das jeweilige Modell wird ausdrücklich für ein fotografisches Bild erstellt, es bildet also eine Art „Vorwirklichkeit“, die nach der Aufnahme so nicht mehr existieren wird.
Die Künstlerin Christa Filser arbeitet ebenso vielfältig und bedient sich verschiedener Gattungen. Doch ihr Augenmerk liegt derzeit auf den Besonderheiten und Einzigartigkeiten des Mediums Collage. Auffallend ist hierbei vor allem, dass sie dabei das Malerische ebenso gekonnt einsetzt wie die exakten und hochpräzise bearbeiteten Fundstücke aus Zeitungen, Hochglanzmagazinen und Büchern.
Central to Christa Filser’s work is the human being, or rather the human image. The artist never lets go of the portrait. However, she rejects all classical basic rules and concentrates on the network of relationships between the self-portraying aesthetics and the true, torn, inner states of the person portrayed.
Through the use of drawing, painting and collage, Christa Filser formulates her own image of human appearance, its shortcomings and its peculiar and acquired behavior towards indoctrinated aesthetics.
And so fictitious, hybrid and surreal beings emerge, mostly detached from the painterly, abstract and colorful background, separated from their environment and reduced to themselves.
The subtle and sometimes whimsical depiction of everyday life, coupled with humorous accents and bright colors, lend the works a visual lightness and yet never lose their profound meaning. Christa Filser’s protagonists are caught in the interplay between voyeurism and exhibitionism – our current omnipresent media understanding of self-dramatization.
