INGRID BRANDSTETTER 2022

The Kovacek & Zetter Gallery invites you to an extensive presentation of the current series of works "Innenwelten. for a better world" by Ingrid Brandstetter. This is the fourth personal exhibition of the artist at the gallery.

Ingrid Brandstetter began the cycle in 2020, when the pandemic forced us to retreat into our own four walls. What began as an almost Biedermeier-like idyll is soon caught up with reality. The world has no regard for this idyll, and the virus has brought many things to light. You can't escape everything that happens around you in the long run. Thus, the artist has added "for a better world" to the original title "Inner Worlds" and brought in topics such as the flight movements triggered by war and hunger. But the addition also refers, cautiously optimistic, to the artist's positive general attitude.

Quoting three picture titles of the exhibition, it goes "Into a Better World," we fight "For a Better World," and we think up the world we want to have in "Think a Better World." This belief in a positive future is essential, it gives us confidence and hope and also the strength to fight for a better world.

At the center of Ingrid Brandstetter's paintings are strong, self-confident women who are ready to fight for their place in the world. They grow out of the artist's imagination, are personalized memories of the most diverse encounters. The faces of the sitters are made up of an incredible number of layers of paint and glazes; for the artist, they are like landscapes full of sculptural formations, full of light and shadow, and of an incredible richness of color. In paintings like "Au musée" or "Anna Times Three" there is a multiplication of the sitter. This is reminiscent of basic principles of kinetism and allows the artist to capture several facets and possible spatial situations of a person at the same time. Full of delight in color, Ingrid Brandstetter invites us to think further about and add to the narratives touched upon in her paintings, achieving not only painterly brilliance and coloristic luminosity, but also an incredible forcefulness and presence that mark her out as a very great painter.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive, scientifically researched catalog.