Angelika schubert
Artist's Statement
What strikes you first about the paintings of Angelika Schubert is the central theme of expressive and psychic power emanating from the bold dominant shapes. The internal scale of this hybrid, half organic, half mythic form, spreading across the background, pushing its power outwards, presents an unfettered freedom. As you watch these diverse and irregular shapes extend their lives, in swirling, rhythmic, dynamic, sometimes violent textures, you are drawn to examine the raw visceral surfaces of the paintings. Mercurial forms coagulate and merge as fluid as the rich paint. Up close each painting presents vitality, unearthing its real nature and true potential, allowing it to shatter and crack or swirl and flow. It blocks and challenges the environment and by juxtaposing texture against texture the artist has created conflicting forces contained in a tenuous equilibrium, leaving the viewer with configurations that embody internal states of being.
Schubert’s direct and immediate handling of the paint in liquid, flowing, spreading, pooling application, which she then manipulates with a array of substances and tools, gives a new expression to the abstract expressionist idea of working out the materials. The pressure she exhorts on the thick raw paint to react against its neighbor extracting shapes that transform into organic imagery with twisting areas of color and form becomes pervasive and expansive. Exploded onto a complex pigments of the backgrounds, themselves a myriad of shifting and elusive indeterminate space, or left to float in a single field of visceral mono-chromatic color, she has created a contesting balance of extremes between the organic and the theatrical. This open intuitive approach emphasizes an abstract type of painting devoid of any constraining planar elements as employed by neo-plasticism.
