No witch anywhere. Only deep red areas in oil nestling against white and green. But stop! The features of a white-haired woman emerge from the colors. And isn’t that a snake tongues over her head? “Witching hour” is the name of the picture by Aneta Kajzer, i.e. witching or witching hour. The recently awarded winner of the Kallmann Prize 2022 smiles. You’ve always felt an affinity for ghosts, and at times also had a soft spot for vampires. She was also inspired by her grandmother’s Polish fairy tales, because in these fairy tales, creatures that were more sinister than the usual characters in this country were up to mischief.
Kajzer, on the other hand, has renounced the genre of horror films ever since one of them kept her from sleeping while on a scholarship in South Korea. Kajzer is someone who loves horror and fears it at the same time. “Even as a child I always wanted to go to the ghost train, but then I covered my eyes,” says the 33-year-old artist. And perhaps it is precisely this conscious enjoyment of ambivalence, this unconcealed joy in the unknown and the enigmatic, the pleasurable play with the vague that makes her art appear so extraordinary.
“Floating Creatures” is the title of the exhibition, which can be seen until January 29th and is of course not really scary. However, anyone who gets involved with the painter’s unusual style actually thinks they are flowing away – into a reality in which war and the energy crisis will have a break from broadcasting. The show in Ismaning is the first solo exhibition by the artist, who was born in Katowice in 1989, grew up in Würzburg and studied at the Mainz University of Art. For Rasmus Kleine, director of the Kallmann Museum in Ismaning, it represents “a particularly exciting position” in German painting, “because it combines the painterly with a statement about the human.”
The first time he noticed Kajzer’s work was at the group exhibition “Now! Young Painting in Germany” in the Kunstmuseum Bonn, said Kleine at the vernissage. Her pictures have already been shown in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. In 2019, the Berlin artist spent three months at the MMCA Goyang in South Korea as part of the Stiftung Kunstfonds work grant.
Aneta Kajzer doesn’t actually paint portraits.
(Photo: Catherine Hess)
This time, the Kallmann Prize was in the portrait category. The seven-member jury, which included Kleine, among others, Monika Bayer-Wermuth, the curator of the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, viewed almost 400 applications this year. And because the portrait also plays an important role in the work of Hans Jürgen Kallmann, the museum in Ismaning, founded in 1992, is showing a selection of portraits of famous representatives from politics, business, the civil service and Art. Franz Josef Strauß recorded a profile of Kallmann. Berthold Brecht and Konrad Adenauer seem to seek direct eye contact with the viewer. It was primarily men that Hans Jürgen Kallmann immortalized after the Second World War. Portraits of three women can also currently be seen in Ismaning: One of them is the actress Therese Giehse, which Kallmann drew on paper in 1972 with a felt pen.
“It’s like looking at the clouds.”
Prizewinner Kajzer, on the other hand, pursues a completely different approach to the human in her painting; she does not paint portraits in the classic sense. Clear contours, pithy facial features that life has left behind – the most detailed reproduction of the characteristic does not take place with her. The artist has opted for the difficult balancing act between representational and abstraction, her pictures appear free and unforced, almost unintentional, and for this reason alone one should be willing to invest a little time in contemplating her art.
Because anyone who gets involved in the colorful compositions, which are replaced in later phases of her work by delicate pink, bright orange or friendly turquoise, will not only see colors in them, but also Kajzer’s wondrous beings. Dogs, ghosts, goblins, witches – only a few clearly identify themselves. “It’s like looking at the clouds,” says the artist. Sometimes the chin area dominates, then only one eye is visible, in the next picture it is a brush hair that accidentally got stuck on the canvas and later became a body part.
Kajzer’s figures appear dark and cheerful, grotesque and cute, sometimes reminiscent of cartoon characters. Which is not surprising when you know how much the artist would like to visit Studio Ghibli in Japan and take a picture there with Totoro, the iconic main character of the anime film “My Neighbor Totoro”.
The artist loves playing with horror.
(Photo: Catherine Hess)
Instead of at an easel, Kajzer paints on the floor. Most of the time, she says, she doesn’t know at the beginning which side will be top or bottom. She never makes sketches, has no finished picture in her head. Her art emerges from the colors that meet on the canvas, some of them heavily diluted. And it is precisely with this openness that Kajzer offers the viewer of her paintings the best that he could wish for in these unsympathetic times: a projection surface for longings, a ticket to escape from reality, a break from this world. What you do with this offer is once again up to you. Kajzer puts it this way: “A picture is unpredictable. Even if I paint an apple, everyone sees something different in it.”