Lydia Maria Pfeffer re-imagines classic mythology, fables, and fairy tales through a contemporary and feminist lens, creating new worlds, that echo memories and familiarity. Self-realized and unapologetic characters fill the canvas and paper, which provide a place for healing, existing, and give a visual voice to the non-conforming and the outcast. Pfeffer tackles profound subjects, such as the basic desire to be loved and connection, but also violence, trauma, and the wounds they inflict: Strength is a Beast of Burden, for example, is an homage to survivors, but also questions the price of endurance and resilience. The artist expresses the human experience as complex, often painful, but also full of joy and sweetness. She enlivens her universes with strong symbols of acceptance - of oneself, of others, and unconditional love. Her paintings offer an escape as much as revelations and new possibilities. One can get lost and found once more in thousands of moments, brimming with vivid colors.
Between symbolism and naive art, borrowing the hues from Henri Rousseau, she brings to life situations and creatures filled with pagan, mythological and queer references. Pfeffer grew up in a small mountain village in Austria, and the ever-present tension and dichotomy between the stronghold of the Catholic Church and the lived Pagan spirit, is a constant source of inspiration for her work. Her paintings and drawings interweave subjects such as overcoming the pressure of perfection, indulging in the journeys that love allows, embracing our chosen families, and celebrating the strength of those, who society has deemed different, weak, or immoral.
Challenging normative expectations and narratives, the works in Love Magic raise questions about representation, the symbolic and literal interpretation of stories that have shaped our subconscious. The large-scale size of the paintings is significant to the celebration of the beings, especially women, and calls to mind the historical importance of the treatment of such subjects. At long last, women who have been distorted, demonized, and misrepresented by religion and mythology, can truly be seen and live as Pfeffer imagines them. In her paintings we re-discover a world which has not forgotten, nor ignored that the Gorgon Medusa was something other than a monster and has not transformed her suffering into a phallocratic pretext.
Love Magic is an ode to figures with complex and nuanced histories, to beauty and existence unburdened by approval, to vulnerability, to innocence lost, to strength, to joy, fashion, and above all - to love, whatever it may look like and seen in the broadest sense, not just romantic, but salvific. The works are a reflection on the unconquerable, a reverence of chthonic nature, and a search for identity, safety, and serenity. Pfeffer renounces the man-made idea of a rigid, fear-inspiring and punishing God. The mermaids in her imagination will not sacrifice their voice for a prince, but instead deal cards underwater.
Nature has returned, and in the forest roams a wild wolf woman, enjoying her serenity and freedom.
Lydia Maria Pfeffer (* 1976 AT) lives and works in New York, USA. She received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2013 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016.
