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ARTCAT



ANNA BOROWY, TANJA SELZER

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel
532 West 25th Street, 917-701-3338
Chelsea
September 8 - October 3, 2011
Reception: Thursday, September 8, 6 - 8:30 PM


Anna Borowy’s motifs are primarily human characters and moments, depicted portrait-style and manifesting particular events. The reduced appliance of outlines and forms connects the figures with the backgrounds and accompanied diaphane images of animals. The apparent youth and grace of the portrayed are distorted by flawed structures and sinister traits.

Repeatedly Anna Borowy joins animals with the human protagonists in her paintings. The expression of this fauna ranges from symbolic meaning to common gestures, but either way the affinity to humans is very imminent and perceivable. Humans and animals are not shown as counterparts, but as reciprocal allegories and impressions without their identities being merged Ovidian-style. It is not easy nowadays to phrase legitimately a primarily positive aesthetic attraction. But Anna Borowy’s works succeed in generating genuine beauty and are capable of deriving from this constituent any other inanimate facet.

Tanja Selzer draws her motifs from the daily media-related flood of images as components of human sceneries, figures in wild natural scenes or single persons and animals in front of or inside a natural background. She changes these images by composition, shift of colour and an ease of paint application, so they appear in the guise of a pretended, mostly idyllic scene.

In the works of the series Gib mir dein Rot (Give me your red) Selzer additionally emphasizes the dynamics of her nature-bound protagonists and scenes to the point of fight-like confrontations and compositions. The idyllic backgrounds remain perceptible as bearings for the image as a whole but are not only contrasted by the drastic actions in the foreground but also are stirred up and involved in it. The alternating depiction of humans and animals also their interactions are an expression of their mirror-symmetric anima. Selzer stages this without psychological abstractions but with the genuine intensity of a direct line to the source of fables.

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