Julia Haller

Opening: 13 May 2008, 7 pm
Lecture by Julia Haller

Julia Haller’s work defies easy definitions. Her paintings challenge with graphic effects that don’t function logically or tastefully, avoid harmonious compositions within which motifs migrate into each other eclipsing the symbiotic relation between finished and unfinished surface. Painting styles – from geometric and informal abstraction to the irreverent idiom of “bad painting” – are intensified with images like ice creams, doodles, chess grids that, obtained with transparent or opaque brushstrokes of primer paint and acrylic colours, transcend the institutionalised modernist vocabulary. Often integrating projections and supplementary structures, such as found trestles or coat racks, which attempt to open the visual field to the nearby environment and identify the possibilities of existence of painting, large light-weight canvases and patterned fabrics fall onto the floor, hang from wooden batons, combine off-cuts from previous studies which re-appear as motifs for new paintings. The formal representation of Haller’s subjects is so reduced they are hard to read, a simplification process that disregards accuracy and designs conceived to gain sympathy in favour of stains, erasures, layers of colour that, wavering between abstraction and figuration, are not afraid to expose all thinking processes. (DB)