Savage Glitter

The new works by the Copenhagen-born artist Marie Irmgard (*1976) encompass genres of painting in a coordinate system, which broadly draws on one's self-perception and the perception of nature by mankind between historical reference points such as Diego Velasquez and Cy Twombly. Under the title “Savage Glitter”, Galerie1214 is displaying a concentrated selection of works for the first time in a solo exhibition in Berlin.

Savage Glitter - a phrasing Irmgard has taken from Joy Williams novel “The Quick and the Dead” - is an allusion to the charged relationship between romanticism (wilderness) and society (trumpery / tinsel), two polarities to which we feel conflictingly attracted. Not without provocation, Irmgard speaks of an attitude of “passive astonishment”, which she cultivates in her paintings and which requires mindfulness rather than prompt judgements. For Irmgard, painting means waiting and consolidating, to create a sense of flow and time. During this process, she moves between concretion in the illustrative and the artistic question, which challenges the abstraction.

Irmgard’s colour scheme has a wide vocabulary, characterised by a technically skilful polarity between a powerful impasto, where the paint is applied thickly and purely, and inbetween applying a delicate glaze containing pure linseed oil as a painting medium with a deliberately-prolonged drying time. As a result, her paintings obtain a subtle repertoire of forms of expression. The characteristic style of her artwork is somewhat changed through the unruliness of a surface dynamic which may be prepared and channelled. Simultaneously surface act “by itself”, according to the laws of physics: in the blending and saturation of the paints, the structuring of the backgrounds; through selected, provoked drops of colour, cracks and cracking techniques or rhizomatic effects which project fine lines with a promise of structure.

For the first time as a full overview, the exhibition will display the open cycle Berlin Flower Series (2014-2018), which delicately updates the imagery of still-lifes and interiors. Irmgard inspires us to re-read the well-used pictural encyclopaedia: She who is initially astonished does not know what it is: a house, an ostrich, wild game, a room – painting is a path on which to rediscover naturalness in the familiar. What something is, which it could be, can be investigated through adding, removing, smearing and superimposing levels and layers. Day and night are almost levelled off in our lifestyles – Irmgard makes this contrast of light and dark legible once more, as she imparts a new meaning to the darker values using light glazes and alabaster-like translucent paint entities, as in the painting dedicated to Charlotte Salomon, “L'ermitage was not the sanctuary it promised to be”.

Marie Irmgard (*1976 in Copenhagen), Studies in English Literature, Art history and Art, graduated in 2010 with a MFA from Funen Art Academy; extended journeys in the United States; since 2003 single and group exhibitions in Arhus, Copenhagen, Memphis (USA), Odense, Stockholm, Viborg; lives and works in Berlin since 2013.

Photos: Markus Bachmann/ Eric Tschernow 2018