Virginie Bailly, Krasimira Stikar

On the exhibitions:
Bailly: Elsy Lahner, Albertina
Stikar: Hartwig Knack, Art Historian and Cultural Scientist

VIRGINIE BAILLY
DAPHNES REQUEST
Paintings

Belgian artist Virginie Bailly will exhibit her latest works at Galerie Straihammer und Seidenschwann for the third time.

Titled Daphne‘s Request, the exhibition is an exploration of Greek mythology, based on a dream in which the artist was transformed into a tree.

With broad brushstrokes and grand gestures, the artist translates her thoughts into painting. She paints exclusively in oil, preferring glaze techniques to give the subject ample brilliance and depth. Some of the elements — agglomerations of brushstrokes and splotches of color — seem to want to take on a whole new state of being from one moment to the next.

Bailly’s abstract paintings portray a dialogue between dream and the real world, fiction and reality, inside and outside, emptiness and abundance.

She creates organized chaos, using it to grasp incredibly dynamic tensions through the paintings.

Krasimira Stikar
PUNKT – GEDANKE – FLÄCHE
Drawings

In her new works, created in 2018, the Krasimira Stikar delves into an exploration of movement, statics, time, and space. Lines and surfaces cover the sheets. The lines grows out of a point, the most original form of representation, they are the tracks of a moving point. These lines are born out of movement, and, as Roman Signer, Explosion (Line), 1982, puts it: “from the destruction of the absolute self-contained serenity of the point.”

Using points, lines, and symbols, we are brought to a plane of imagination that goes beyond rational thinking. Points and lines connect to supply information. Spaces and surfaces are created by means of points and lines situated on a two-dimensional surface. The abstract is transformed into something concrete and vivid. Things that are not sensory are made observable, analyzable, and reflective.

The artist takes a great amount of time, quiet thinking, and contemplation to create these sensitive aesthetic works. This calm concentration seems to wash over the observer when looking at the pieces.