CONNY MAIER AT ART BASEL UNLIMITED 2023

Conny Maier
The Source, 2023
oil paint, oil stick, and pigments on canvas

A source is literally where a stream of water begins, but the word also refers to a kind of generative force: a cause, a point of origin, an initiator. All of the term’s different meanings permeate Conny Maier’s large-scale diptych The Source, whose ambivalence is heightened by the unclear relationships between the painting’s figures. There is a peculiar timeless to The Source and the scenes it depicts could just as easily take place in the distant past as in some brave new world future. Its pastoral setting, archetypal subject matter, and vibrant colors are unsettled by the misshapen figures who inhabit the landscape—and threaten to tear this world asunder. And yet, their warped bodies can also be read as a testament to the perpetual struggle of finding balance in a constantly changing world.

Conny Maier lives and works in Berlin and Baleal, Portugal.
Her painterly reflections on polarities like power and submission, equilibrium and instability, the human and the non-human take an unflinching look at the final throes of the Anthropocene and ask what a new future might hold.

Ruttkowski;68 in collaboration with Société.