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Alexandra Sonntag – It's all too beautiful
Location: EMDE GALLERY - Mainz
Alexandra Sonntag – It's all too beautiful
OPENING: Friday, December 8th, 6 pm to 8:30 pm
The Emde Gallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Alexandra Sonntag in the gallery. Large and medium format works from the artist's current oeuvre will be on display, alongside a selection of smaller watercolour works.
A central theme in Alexandra Sonntag's paintings is the landscape with its plant and vegetation formations. The title "It's all too beautiful" also refers to the playfully distorted approach to the subject.
It is important for the understanding and effect of the paintings that the artist perceives the landscape in its entirety as a moving event, an event that, as she herself says, creates "fluid afterimages" in her (see also Prof. Dr Andreas Beaugrand, in: Jahresprogramm 2023, Kunstverein Oerlinghausen e.V.), which serve her as inspiration for the paintings - similar to the surrealists' dreams and subconscious. Once fleeting memories are superimposed on what she has seen and experienced, they unfold and solidify on the canvas in the painting process. The pictures oscillate between the real experience, which is hinted at in the paintings, and the artist's condensed subjective memories. It is this field of tension that characterises Alexandra Sonntag's landscape paintings.
Alexandra Sonntag's painting is always at the interface between abstraction and figuration. Her canvases are projection surfaces and playgrounds for different painting techniques. They can contain both thickly applied, coarse traces of colour and smoothly painted surfaces, both opaque and semi-transparent layers of paint, as well as delicately worked details and intuitively applied, quick brushstrokes. The expressive gestures that run through all of her works create a lightness and fleetingness in the colour-intensive, format-filling compositions. Although the canvases are painted right through to the edges and have hardly any empty spaces, they appear anything but heavy.
Landscape and figurative associations include, for example, surreal-looking plant kingdoms and flower paintings or river and lake landscapes, such as in the painting "Schleiche", which is one of the main pictures in the exhibition: The picture is painted in generous, gestural brushstrokes whose expressive gesture gives the impression that the individual pictorial elements flow smoothly and organically into one another. While the work as a whole appears abstract, the underlying overall structure is reminiscent of a river landscape in which an orange-coloured body of water meanders through blue-purple vegetation - whereby the changeability and adaptability of the water is visualised in the movement of the colours and forms.
Other works, on the other hand, are characterised by intertwined networks of lines and camouflage-like, small-scale areas of colour that reveal a meticulous working method and are reminiscent of a kind of "painting by numbers" aesthetic.
Only from a distance do the individual elements come together to form the foliage and branches of a tree or forest scenes, while closer inspection reveals a wealth of details.
Alexandra Sonntag's seemingly organic and surreal pictorial worlds, which subtly play with colour and form, do not follow any physical or narrative order. Instead, they represent a universe of their own that defies the laws of the world and plays with the viewer's associations.
Alexandra Sonntag, born in Herford in 1969, studied painting at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig. After completing her studies, she was a master student of John M. Armleder. Her works have been shown in numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions, including at the Museum Bünde, the Kunstverein Herford, the Kulturamt Frankfurt am Main, the EPH Zurich, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bern, the Bielefelder Kunstverein, the Museum Marta Herford, the Frauenmuseum Bonn and the Franke Museum Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Works by Alexandra Sonntag are represented in numerous public collections, for example in the collection of the Kunstverein Neustadt am Rübenberge, the Treuhand Frankfurt, the Stadtwerke Bielefeld and in various private collections. She lives and works in Bielefeld and Geneva.
Artist
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