Julia Maurer Julia Maurer

JULIA MAURER / DON'T BE SHY

My pictures are not specifically planned, they just come about in a kind of experiment; before I begin, the canvas is blank, with no preliminary drawing or sketch. They are only available in pencil on paper. Strictly speaking, the drawings are something of their own. You are faster and more direct. The painting is a reflection on it that is still very much attached to the drawings.
The pictures are depictions of everyday situations. It's about the (self-) observation of small, psychological details, not about big feelings, but about an everyday melancholy, the indeterminacy and the - also physical- uncertainty of being in the world. The small formats contribute to the distance and calm that I want to convey. Most subjects are private and personal to intimate, which gives the viewing something voyeuristic. The coloring and painterly unpolishedness underline the fleeting and random character of the pictures. Their external shape is also intended.
No theory or philosophy is conveyed, but a feeling is communicated. The images are a stronger, better, and more direct means of expressing emotions that are difficult to put into words. (With Matisse: painters are people who have nothing to say. And with Derrida: I only speak one language and it is not mine.)

JULIA MAURER

A small room with a big impact. The Viennese, born in 1983, presents her pictures to the public in a Russian hanging. Different small formats are hanged tightly on just two walls, Julia Maurer lets the presentation of her paintings with drawings run out. Small “scraps of paper” on which stories are told that invite you to look at them but also to smile. Her painting and drawing are so very different. With skillfully quick strokes, she sketches everyday scenes, be it a ski jumper, a piano player or an elderly lady with a stick. “The drawings just happen,” says Julia Maurer, who graduated from Erwin Bohatsch's abstraction class last summer. Painting is different. Even if the finished picture hides this, the painting starts with a very cheerful colored palette. Gradually the layers are applied to the painting ground and the picture darkens noticeably, whereby the last - often as a black layer - comes as such onto the picture carrier and does not result from the overlapping of the colors. Finally, the viewer stands in front of a dark work that plays with a variety of shades of gray. In her diploma thesis, Julia Maurer speaks of the "everyday melancholy" that takes place in her pictures…. Eva-Maria Bechter, excerpt from exh. MUSA, Vienna 2008, "Better to say nothing"

JULIA MAURER / DON'T BE SHY

As in the previous year, the canon of figuration dominates the painting and drawing media of young contemporary artists. A wide range of formal and thematic options can be identified. It ranges from factual, photographically oriented articulations to examples in which the work equipment itself comes to the fore.
Julia Maurer has primarily dedicated herself to the small format. Mostly operating in pale and earthy colors, the young artist paints delicate, fragile pictures with personal content. These paintings are evidence of silence and poetry: a romantic atmosphere spreads: a skier from behind, a tree in the vastness of the landscape.
Florian Steininger, member of the Strabag Artaward jury, curator Bank Austria Kunstforum

JULIA MAURER 

1983 born in Vienna
2002-07 Study of painting with Walter Obholzer and Erwin Bohatsch at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, diploma
2005 stay at the Glasgow School of Art
Lives and works in Vienna

Exhibition selection

2008 Better not to say anything, MUSA, Museum on Demand, Vienna
2007 students of Erwin Bohatsch, Galerie Bleich-Rossi, Vienna Potzblitz, temporary Swingr room, Vienna Im Zentrum am Rand, Weinstadtmuseum Krems,
2006 annual exhibition of the academy, curator project, Vienna Smile sweetheart, Ebendorf RaumAcht, Vienna
2004 Walter Obholzer and students, Galerie 422, Gmunden
2003 Alternative annual exhibition, Area 53, Vienna

> Julia Maurer