The works of Aneta Kajzer are characterized by successive states of saturation / clarification, heaviness / delicacy, appearance / disappearance and moreover combine figuration and abstraction, maintained in a state of tension so that neither one prevails over the other. This co-existence is not a compromise but rather a standpoint, a means of inhabiting painting while it still thinks for itself. For the artist, the distinction between abstraction and figuration is irrelevant, stemming from an outdated notion of division, inherited from an era when it was still considered that painting had to choose between the real world and itself. She situates herself in the aftermath of this period, in an epoch where form and flow, silhouettes and smudges belong in the same continuum. In Aneta Kajzer’s practice, the visible and the sensory intermingle, color gives rise to form in the same manner that sound gives rise to resonance and her painting is thus a realm of a constant flow between what is revealed and what has melted away.
Aneta Kajzer’s painting borrows as much from the liberty of Helen Frankenthaler’s washes and fields of color as it does from the figurative work of Maria Lassnig, Miriam Cahn and Nicole Eisenman, who are all true heroines to her. It’s not a question of abstraction succeeding figuration or vice versa: it is their shared vitality that gives birth to the painting. A flowing brushstroke becomes a lock of hair; a brown drip melts into a curtain of rain: two black dots open up into eyes; spilled cadmium takes the form of a mouth; the swipe of a metal paint-tube carves out the line that was missing in a pencil-less drawing.

— Jean-Charles Vergne

More abstract than CoBrA, more colorful than Joyce Pensato, Aneta Kajzer’s work sits assuredly in the ranks of Bad Painting. It eschews the normative concepts of the image, alternating between seriousness and humor and daringly treading the borderline between beauty and ugliness. Her deformed, diverse and sometimes-contradictory figures allow the spectator some insight into the artist’s social preoccupations: it is of no consequence if some things remain unresolved, as long as they exist. Her artistic process begins with her choice of colors and strokes, from which at first transitory forms emerge that constantly evolve before finally taking on their definitive shapes. In constant dialog with the motifs that appear on her canvases, Kajzer alternates between planned and intuitive gestures. She creates conflicting arrangements between abstraction and figuration, combining contradictory forms of expression. Often a perfectly placed comma of paint resolves the conundrum of the image as a whole, making full use of the phenomena of pareidolia and suggestive association.

Aneta Kajzer was born in 1989 in Katowice in Poland and lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Kunsthochschule Mainz and was awarded a residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. In 2018, she participated in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt, a development program for female visual artists. Her work is regularly exhibited, particularly in shows dedicated to the contemporary rejuvenation of German art such as Now ! Painting in Germany Today in Deutschland, shown at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz and Museum Wiesbaden in 2019-2020. She has also enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions, most notably at the Conrads Gallery in Düsseldorf, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien and the Institut für Moderne Kunst in Nuremburg.