Press and Text Dossier
Press release
Anna Altmeier's paintings are rooted in Romanticism, Symbolism and Surrealism. The titles of her picture groups, which are always developed in cycles, express this: “Insomnia”, “Residual Light”, “Snow White is growing up”. A world opens up hovering between dream and reality, in the sense of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Night Pieces”. The world seems incomprehensible, orders of space and magnitude shift to the misterious. Fear and anxiety are rampant. The colors stray - and where they sometimes appear downright lovely, the scenery immediately tilts back again into the misty and uncanny. That is increased by the fact that the world that appears is by no means yesterday, but entirely - down to the last detail - to be settled in today. In some ways, this is reminiscent of works by Leonor Fini, but the independence of the complex pictorial inventions is unmistakable. These not only develop thematically, the special technique of a multi-layered painting in mixed media is also decisive: the layers correspond to the content of the pictorial inventions. As in the famous "Wunderblock" by Sigmund Freud, what has been forgotten or repressed shimmers out and thus opens up the abyss in a paradoxically poetic way. If these pictures are reminiscent of romanticism, then at least those that are described as black, dark or even negative.
Konrad Tobler, art critic and curator, Bern, 2020
Bibliography
Videos
Zürich liest - Ausschnitt aus der Buchbesprechung "Schneewittchen wird erwachsen"
Zürich liest - Excerpt from the book review "Snow White grows up".
Event "Zürich liest" 2018. book presentation "Schneewittchen wird erwachsen". Hans Urs Aerni in conversation with the artist Anna Altmeier (painting) and the author Burkhard Friese (text). The book is published by Münster Verlag, Basel.