Aurelia Gratzer: Malerei!

While painting has been used for centuries to capture an image of reality - a so-called view from the window - on canvas, Aurelia Gratzer deliberately questions this depiction.

Her works are based on small-format advertisements from magazines. The spaces that confront us are a means to an end. The central perspective of the rooms is broken down into individual surfaces. She meticulously works out the procedure for her painting, like a script, in which the template is then transformed into its own exciting three-dimensionality. There is hardly any room for chance here, even if Aurelia Gratzer has recently consciously allowed herself to deviate from this predetermined plan. In a slow, layered painting technique, the central perspective is now transferred: The linear features of the perspective are not altered, and yet they appear illogical to the viewer, deviating from the predetermined reality. Perception is always at the centre of Aurelia Gratzer's art.

Can our own perception be questioned at all? Aren't our visual impressions and their interpretation just our own reality? Is this then also to be equated with the reality, perception and interpretation of our counterpart?

These are the questions that Aurelia Gratzer deals with intensively in her paintings; in the tension between ‘authentic’ depiction and irritation. Spatial perception, which suddenly raises the question of perspective, and the examination of binocular vision, which is not characterised by central perspective, play a central role. In order to investigate these areas, she makes use of painting's very own medium: colour, a two-dimensional painting surface and the brush as a painting tool.

Each surface is treated equally, considered individually and painted on the canvas without the causal connection of the larger picture. The irritations that arise for the viewer - often only after a longer look - are thus already inherent in the painting process. What is rational reality? This is the question behind this process, because reality always refers to two different levels: The level of knowledge and the level of perceived perception.

 Aurelia Gratzer sees her painting increasingly in relation to abstraction. The fact that the individual surfaces appear on the canvas with the same value results in a painterly equal treatment that detaches the optic nerve from the reality of the depiction. Recognition lies solely in the knowledge of the representational quality.