Balance & System
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Sebastijan Zupancic
Heinrich Küpper
Christiane Löhr
Thomas Müller
DRAWING NOW - PARIS (F)
Katharina Hinsberg

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Maja Majer-Wallat
Balance & System - May 29 until June 26, 2021

 

We are looking forward to the first solo exhibition with works by Maja Majer-Wallat.

If you look at the ceiling of the gallery, a part of the room that is very rarely the place for works of art, you will see lines floating freely in the room, slightly to strongly curved, with distinct thickenings at both ends. A closer look reveals dried poppy seed stems and capsules, which the artist has usually joined together in pairs, and three, four or more of them are joined together with almost invisible threads. No motor, no artificial air source, only the own movement in space and the rising body heat set the mobile in motion. Silently, new and surprising spatial drawings emerge before the eyes of the viewer*. Whoever gets involved in this becomes more and more calm and gets into a meditative observation position.

Depending on the lighting, the mobiles cast shadow lines once or several times on the wall. This is how temporary wall drawings are created.

At the beginning of the artistic examination of the poppy is the discovery of the flower stamp. Majer-Wallat takes the term literally and prints with it on paper.

The exhibition is complemented by ceramic sculptures from the group of works "Koine, Das Gemeinsame im Verschiedenen" (Koine, The Common in the Different), which was created in the 1980s and exhibited at Artothek Cologne in 1984.

Maja Majer was born in Bonn in 1948, she lives and works in Cologne. The beginning of Maja Majer-Wallat's artistic activity goes back to the end of the seventies in Cologne. After training as a hat maker in the mid-1960s and two formative years in Paris in 1968/1969, she decided to study fine art at the Cologne Werkschulen/Fachhochschule Köln. She founded the Galerie am Ubierring in the neighborhood of the school, where she showed exhibitions by artists such as Mike Hentz, Martin Schwarz, Felix Kemner and others. She studies painting with Karl Marx, ceramics with Walter Heufelder and does her master class with Eduardo Paolozzi. The multi-part ceramic work "Koine, Das Gemeinsame im Verschiedenen", exhibited in 1984 at the Artothek Cologne, represents the climax and at the same time the end of this first active period as an artist. In 2017, after retiring as press spokeswoman of the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, she begins her work with the poppy plants, which she presents to the public for the first time in a solo presentation.

"What remains where little holds? The power of balance appears in the Mobiles Maja Majer-Wallats as filigree floating. This ability to survive, which always also has an immense constructive character that is only shifted into the subconscious, acts like a persistent elixir of life: existing in interaction with the elements.

For the artist it is a return to statement after a long pause. Perhaps this is precisely a quality that art today often lacks, the idea that one can step back and return. Then the search for a location also has less manic and lost, but becomes a decision. Maturity and freshness are inherent in these works with unpretentious elegance".

Oliver Tepel in Cologne Galleries A-Z April-June 2020

Images: David Ertl

 
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