Curator : Sabine Maria Schmidt

Aneta Kajzer belongs to a younger generation of painters who are attracting increasing international attention with an unconventional and immediate visual language and aesthetic. Her painting cannot be assigned to any specific movement. At the same time, her pictorial spaces and landscapes are populated by strange phenomena, faces, and beings.

Her works arise directly from the process of painting itself. There are (apparently) no predetermined concepts or preparatory sketches. Shapes and areas move across the surface like natural events, clouds, or dream images. From this, figurative elements emerge: creatures, faces, landscapes, which then dissolve again. This may happen playfully, threateningly, or quite unexpectedly.

She mostly works in large formats, favoring the vertical orientation, which demands a bodily relationship between image and viewer. This physical encounter is a prerequisite for an immediate experience. It creates a visual probing and exploration of the pictorial spaces. Sometimes the paint flows thinly and broadly, sometimes layers accumulate on top of each other. Much disappears again after it has emerged. What has been seen does not necessarily remain visible; other elements only appear after repeated viewing.

Aneta Kajzer’s painting is anything but abstract, contrary to frequent interpretations. She does not reduce figuration. On the contrary: from her colors grows a proliferating pictorial life. It is also the creaturely aspect that captivates us. What we see remains contradictory. We recognize—or rather sense—something of the mechanisms of our own perception.

For her institutional solo exhibition at the Neue Galerie Gladbeck, a selection of works from the past five years has been assembled, exemplifying the development of her practice and her various painterly approaches. The presentation within the gallery’s distinctive architecture marks an important milestone in the artist’s exhibition history.