Katharina Maderthaner
Miracoli!
Miracoli! solo show of Katharina Maderthaner (Meerbusch, Germany, 1982) artist formed at Bergischen University of Wuppertal and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf as a student of Richard Deacon.
The exhibition, accompanied by a text by Alessandro Pinto, is organized in collaboration with Verein Düsseldorf – Palermo.
The artistic work of Katharina Maderthaner finds inspiration in some bizarre situations of daily life: artificial plants that are inside the moldy offices of certain officials, faux marble covering floors or bar counters of public places that try to simulate a non-existent luxury, websites or advertising flyers with improbable background pattern created in Photoshop by amateur designers who try to reproduce vanguard textile design ...
All this triggers a short circuit between real and simulated, between original and imitation, between good and bad taste, which causes in the Artist the need to rework the experience through a work of synthesis and sublimation, until the creation of something absolutely new, completely devoid of any pretense of social criticism.
“The atmosphere of situations like this stay in my mind like a “sound” or a “taste“. But my works are not an illustration or depiction of these objects or situations ; I´m interested to play with the peculiarity, oddness or absurdity of these things. Objects, sculptures, paintings and drawings are at the end only what they want to be. They are getting autonomous because -despite their oddity- I take them seriously, I do not judge them. I don´t differentiate in my perception between high- and low-culture. Everything has an equal value. I play with supposedly good and bad taste and my works often have both: something cheerful and at the same time something repulsive.”
The works of Maderthaner in this way arouse the viewer a uncomfortable of deja-vu, reminding us something that we think we know: banal reflects serious, copy reflects original, fake and imitation reflect real, in an amalgam between daily bricolage and a hidden genius, masterpiece and mass product, design and disaster.
So, the Artist creates a passage between the two worlds, transforming the one into the other and she bluring/effacing boundaries. In her installations, images and objects there are references which in turn are part of other references. A long genealogy of taste unfolds before the viewer of her art. As a symbolic current that drags objects, images, ideas and motifs, leaving behind a rich, diverse and bizarre deposit.
In this way, Maderthaner opens prodigiously a door toward the new, toward the perception of an unexpected beauty, "because beauty - says Katharina - is not something that is IN things, it is BETWEEN them - and between them and us."
18 x 24 cm (26,6 x 32,6 cm framed) polished chrome frame with Mirogard Plus Glas
18 x 24 cm (26,6 x 32,6 cm framed) polished chrome frame with Mirogard Plus Glas
80 x 60 x 3,5 cm
Variable dimensions
69 x 23 x 3 cm
69 x 23 x 3 cm
69 x 23 x 3 cm
