By Yvonne Türler-Kürsteiner
Baratti, Chipilo, Puerto Vallarta and Favignana are some of the titles of Andrea Muheim's latest works. They refer to beaches far from Muheim's life and work center in Zurich's District 4 and could suggest an irrepressible wanderlust on the part of the artist. But this is not the case. Not out of personally motivated wanderlust, but rather by chance, sometimes even quite reluctantly, she ended up on the Aegadian Islands or in Mexico… It was worth it in any case. The photos she took here and there serve her – sometimes even years later – as templates and an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Some of them were black and white, others in color. She adheres to this in her painterly execution as well. At least that's what one thinks at first glance. Upon closer inspection, however, colors emerge even from the brightest whites or the darkest blacks. Delicate orange or blue tones push to the surface. They are what immerse Muheim's motifs in that mysterious light so characteristic of the mood in her paintings. "Dark colors are indeed typical of my work and certainly have a melancholic component. But I am by no means melancholic, quite the opposite. In contrast to dark colors, the light simply comes into its own much better," says Andrea Muheim. And that is what she is after. Light is her great passion. This is where the artist focuses her attention – in life, when photographing, and in painting.
This was already the case in her cityscapes and landscapes. They thrive on the diffuse, mostly nocturnal play of light, which occasionally takes on a life of its own to such an extent that the motif is outshone and dissolved by the light's own momentum. People are hardly visible in them. In the current works, this is different, but not fundamentally new. Andrea Muheim has been painting people for over 20 years and has made a name for herself as a nuanced and accomplished portrait painter, among other things. What is new, however,
is that the people in her paintings are no longer in interior spaces but outdoors, on wide beaches. They evoke that feeling of freedom and connection with nature that humanity has always longed for and which holds a firm place in the iconography of European art history.
And the looser brushwork is also new. It is the painterly response to the search for freedom and also lends Andrea Muheim's paintings a new dynamism, which finds its counterpart both in the captured movement of the people in the paintings and in the wildly churning masses of water. The working pace has become faster. Contours are blurred and dissolve, people become shadow figures in backlight, lose their faces, recede into the distance, and are only recognizable as such from close up. No longer identifiable, relatives and acquaintances from Andrea Muheim's photo albums become anonymous staffage figures in her paintings, which allow the grandeur of nature to stand out all the more clearly, or become symbols of the human dialogue with nature itself, perhaps also figures of identification for the viewer's own feelings and longings. That, at any rate, would be entirely in the spirit of the artist.
Although Andrea Muheim, as in earlier work cycles, also bases these new works exclusively on her own photographs, she seems to be increasingly distancing herself from the photographic source.
In the foreground are the liberated painterly gesture and the accompanying mood, which oscillates between setting off for new shores and being at one with oneself and nature.
Quest of Freedom – the search for freedom. This is an act of liberation that takes place on various levels. On Andrea Muheim's very personal level, because her son has become independent, is going his own way, and thereby opens up new possibilities for her as a woman and artist; on the level of motif, because the people in the paintings are released from confining architecture into the open nature; on the painterly level, which manifests itself in the freer gesture and the increasing detachment from the photographic source; and finally on the metaphorical level, because it is about more than reproducing holiday memories at well-known bathing beaches. Baratti, Chipilo, Puerto Vallarta, or Favignana are interchangeable destinations. They become metaphors for an attitude toward life that is not oriented to geographical coordinates and is bound neither to specific people nor to time. It can arise anytime and anywhere, even in Zurich's District 4.
