Marcela Böhm – Hard Way
August 31st – October 5th, 2024.
Opening August 30th, 7 p.m.
The exhibition “Hard Tour” focuses on two major motifs with which the Argentine-German artist Marcela Böhm repeatedly deals: On the content level, it is social people in a wide variety of structures, in families, partnerships and Friendship, in joy and suffering, which she observes and which she knows how to draw precisely in her unique visual language. And on the formal level she works on figurative painting that always experimentally explores its formal limits and often exceeds them.
The theme and title of the exhibition “Hard Tour” are taken from a painting 
(“The Hard Way”, 80 x 110 cm): A young girl stands in front of an overgrown bamboo forest, ready to penetrate this thicket. Where will the path lead? – A question that, figuratively speaking, is more difficult than ever to answer, especially for young people. Because regardless of the personal uncertainty, global crises await young people that seem insoluble.
It is nature that shows no consideration and threatens our civilization. Marcela Böhm processes her experiences at the Iguacu waterfalls, which effortlessly washed away all the footbridges, dams and bridges within a few days after heavy rain.
The catastrophe is also subliminally discussed in other images. There are two very abstract and fragmentary pictures (“The Last Word” / “Having the Say”, each 60 x 90 cm) that are inspired by car wrecks, but don’t actually reveal anything really concrete. Starting from the visualization of objects, Marcela Böhm develops an interplay of recognizable shapes and abstract strokes of color, of spaces and structures that combine to form pure painting. And that is the special quality of Marcela Böhm’s painting: Every picture is a new invention, nothing is fixed.
Again and again she finds new solutions to painting problems, according to the motto “Let’s see where it takes me…”, and is willing to continually go beyond the boundaries of representational painting.
In this exhibition, Marcela Böhm thinks critically about the state of our current world, which is by no means hopeless, because a rainbow is shining again over the waterfalls of the Iguacu (“Mass and Volume”, 80 x 120 cm). Marcela Böhm takes visitors on a journey through the possibilities of representational painting, and in this field she is one of the outstanding personalities in the art discourse.
Human civilizational development is of no use in the face of such natural disasters; control is an illusion. It remains unclear to what extent the highly developed human being himself helps in the destruction of his livelihood. Likewise, whether young people will succeed in finding solutions to the global crises.
Marcela Böhm in Kunstforum International, Bd. 295, May 2024
Available at the gallery!
