Gerlind Zeilner
Touch Point
June 25 – July 30, 2022
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Touch Point, an exhibition of paintings by Austrian artist Gerlind Zeilner. Our second solo show with Zeilner, the exhibition comprises figure and object portraiture rendered in reduced compositions with gently phosphorescent oil and tempura paint. Touch Point will be on view at our Brussels gallery from June 25 – July 30, 2022.
Touch Point studies that which is close at hand – the artist’s family and friends, the items that surround her daily life – saturating the mundane with reinvigorated novelty. The exhibition is divided into two distinct but related series: figure portraits and object studies. Commonplace household objects, from a laptop to a coronavirus take-home test, are represented in pale greens, purples, blues and pinks against the stark white canvas. Most of the canvas consists of this white negative space, making the brushstrokes comprising quotidian objects all the more palpable. A kind of cheeky irony ties Zeilner’s choice of objects together, from the potty humor of Toilet, to the visual parallels between paintbrushes in Studio 4 and herbs in Parsley.
The series of figural portraits are painted with the same, quasi-abstracted matrix that guides Zeilner’s object portraits. Painted in real time before her live subjects, the works depict children, men, and women seated before the viewer in casual clothes. The only environmental details Zeilner adds are lines indicating creases in the room’s architecture, quick brushstrokes suggesting the chairs her subjects sit on, and geometric washes of color representing wall hangings behind them. The energy of the artist’s brushstrokes imparts a sense of movement and liveness upon the representations of her subjects, whose facial expressions communicate mood and tone through their almost ghostly renderings. The portraits are “something like a confrontation between a formal idea – the reduced formal system – and the actual people sitting before me,” said Zeilner of the works.
Subtleties of gesture, expression, architecture, and movement are matched with Zeilner’s choice of materials, egg tempera and oil paint. Zeilner explains that she is drawn to the combination because of their differences of color and surface. While oil paint is heavier, richer, and more reflective, egg tempura produces a matte lightness that bolsters the paintings’ levity.
Gerlind Zeilner (b. 1971 in Mödling, Austria; lives and works in Vienna, Austria) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Zeilner’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz; Galerie Donopoulos International Fine Arts, Thessaloniki, Greece; and Tresor, Kunstforum der Bank Austria, Vienna. Zeilner’s work will also be included an upcoming group exhibition at Kunstraum Engländerbau, Vaduz, Liechtenstein, and has been included in exhibitions at Kunstraum am Schauplatz, Vienna; and Albertina, Vienna.