«Andrea Muheim is an anatomist who bends over her intimate life,» writes curator and author Sibylle Omlin in the text for the artist monograph, which will be published at the opening of the exhibition of the same name: The publication «Malerei als Selbstgespräch» (Painting as Self-Dialogue) presents an overview of the work of Zurich painter Andrea Muheim (born 1968).
The exhibition at Villa Renata makes the artist's very sensual oeuvre spatially accessible in the truest sense. This is all the more interesting as Andrea Muheim particularly likes to address the theme of space in her works. The spaces the artist depicts are often very intimate: the bathroom, the bed in the bedroom after lovemaking, her studio, the view from the window. But the landscape is also captured – the snow, the sea. Unlike the book, the exhibition is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. It primarily features figurative painting in the genres of portrait, landscape, and still life. Furthermore, embroideries and objects are also on display. Muheim's self-dialogues bring us very close to the artist's world, her family and friendships, and they are often very intimate. Eroticism plays a significant role, yet anything voyeuristic is avoided. On the contrary, while faces and bodies are often rendered in intense colors and drawn directly, this preserves the figures' intimacy, for the emotional world is – whether through backlighting composition or blurring – not visible in facial expressions or realistic gestures, but rather in the posture and orientation of the portrayed bodies and faces in relation to a counterpart, the space, the surroundings.
