Antonia Freisburger creates surreal visual worlds that emanate from her fascination with everything unknown in our universe. With painterly condensations of multiple layers, free-flowing surfaces, and colorful, luminous, expanding forms, the artist attempts to approach the unspeakable with her sensitivity to the environment. Immersing us in a reality that seems fictitious, independent of time and place.
In her first solo exhibition at Galerie Droste, entitled Trust Issues, Freisburger goes a step further and confronts the subconscious as the source of her artistic inspiration. While she initially saw painting as an escape from reality, she now consciously embraces the construct of emotions conditioned by dreams, suffering, desire, our existence and everything beyond, which has accompanied her work from the beginning.
Thus, the new series of works expresses Freisburger's identity as an external manifestation of herself. Based on the cosmos as the origin of inspiration, the focus shifted to the constant expansion of ego consciousness, the body, sexuality. All this is preceded by emotional ambivalence, a fear of one's own finiteness that is only too readily repressed. The vague longing for infinity and the simultaneous awe and sadness that the dimensions of the universe will probably never be tangible, even if we try to make the unspeakable sayable and to derive our own, superior reality, a "super-reality".
Dynamic curves, powerful bends, and delicate textures emerge in the canvases, paper works, and floor paintings as eye-catching features that extend through the space like a binding energy. Accompanied by lightly pastel and brightly dazzling colors that seem to rhythmically alternate within the works into foreground and background, in passage and transition, we enter a familiar-seeming, as it were, previously unknown atmosphere. A variety of associative possibilities is what makes the artist’s oeuvre so fascinating: Stylized, organic forms that remind us of the vast, endless universe, of the most diverse facets of mycology, of sexual organs, membranes, or even muscular bodies. The chain of thought is left to ourselves, as is the personal river of emotions, which can already begin at the source of the exhibition - the title Trust Issues.
Antonia Freisburger lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. She graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2018 as a master student of Andreas Schulze.
