Tina Braegger, Vom Bordstein bis zur Skyline

Tina Braegger, Vom Bordstein bis zur Skyline

Online Viewing Room
Opening

Dec 18, 2021 6:00 PM

Closing

Feb 19, 2022 6:00 PM

Location

Weiss Falk (Zürich)

Sonneggstrasse 82

8006 Zürich

Mitwirkende Künstler
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Perhaps it’s not really your thing. You may even hate it. And honestly, I can understand it if you do. I myself thought her first show at Weiss Falk, The Great Fool Braegger, was absolutely awful; I assumed it for the cynical painting of a crafty trickster armed with a pimped-up concept of the sign. But then my position reversed completely, and fast; it was with the Träuschlingsverwandten at the latest. Her appropriation of the Marching Bears shows an admirable consistency – to ride the horse to the point of exhaustion and then remain seated elegantly in the saddle, even when it’s long dead. Tina’s conscious restriction of the painterly frame of action wouldn’t be so interesting in and of itself, however, were she not so comprehensive in her exploitation of the bears’ technical, symbolic, and narrative conditions. To expand into limitation – I’d like to see someone else pull that off!

In fact, Tina doesn’t aim at provoking a particular reaction when conceiving her works, and neither does she waste too much thought on her audience. And yet the repeated and sometimes strong sense of rejection one encounters as a follower of hers does say something about the work. Perhaps it’s the sly nonchalance with which she handles her chosen medium that upsets some people. Instead of confirming the frequently invoked end of painting via a babble of references on stretched canvas, or the usual byways of anti, non, or para-painting, she instead flirts with a supposed anti-intellectualism that opens up a unique path to her. She even has the audacity to let her children color in the paintings, or walks barefoot over the wet canvases. Painters hate this kind of heresy. And if the paintings themselves don’t cause offence for once, the derision with which Tina mocks the ancient human fear of death is sure to. Some clearly consider her to be far too flippant in her treatment of a taboo, even if this objection is based on the shaky foundation of a one-dimensional interpretation.

It may be due to this rejection from certain corners that Tina has sardonically labelled herself a maverick, with the provocative ghetto-aphorism “Vom Bordstein bis zur Skyline” (From the sidewalk to the skyline). As someone who does not curb her ambitions and prefers to win than play by the rules. But even beyond all ironic appeal, strategic self-positioning, and commentary on art-world sensitivities, the title does actually disclose something, since ultimately, the maximalism of this statement corresponds to the current expansion of her program as a painter. The spirits of the bears still wander through the pictures, of course, but they are no longer necessarily axially aligned to them. At times they are even dissected and spread out like the proverbial bearskin. Everything moves up a notch in scale; one might think that the parts now have to stand for the whole. At the same time, though, the smaller and quieter aspects of the paintings also slip into focus: overpainted areas, gradients, lurid contrasts, technical details. To continue expanding what is in fact the narrow cosmos of the bears is a further sleight of hand, but somehow also an arrival. Tina has asphalted her unique path into painting, and so now, she can abandon herself all the more fully to painting’s enjoyable and supposedly more regressive elements. Painting, then.

Moritz Scheper

Externer Link:
https://www.weissfalk.com/