Tanja Selzer, Wild Claims – Paintings
Tanja Selzer, Wild Claims – Paintings
In the exhibition WILD CLAIMS we arre presenting paintings and watercolours by Berlin artist Tanja Selzer from 8 March 2024. By overlaying images from mass media and film stills with her own feelings, she creates new images that express freedom, closeness to nature, eroticism and individuality, but also vulnerability. Real and fabulous creatures want to seduce the viewer to lead a free and self-determined life in a safe place.
Freedom, individuality and self-determination of each individual are an important part of our lives, even if we live in times in which tolerance and understanding for those who think and live differently is decreasing and is met with increasing aggression. In art, nudity as an expression of human naturalness is also a metaphor for truth; nevertheless – or precisely because of this – such images are increasingly not tolerated due to supposed “hurt feelings” and are censored or even banned in social media, such as the depiction of Michelangelo’s David in Dubai, Florida or even in Scotland.
Tanja Selzer rejects this prudery and restriction of freedom and defies it. Like her fellow artists Elisabeth Peyton and Cecily Brown, she is inspired by images from the mass media and film stills, which in Tanja Selzer’s case also include pornographic films that are considered to be the domain of men. She is interested in the emotional content of these models and creates free spaces in her pictures in order to lead an independent and self-determined life in safe places. Tanja Selzer’s oil paintings and watercolours reflect longings and desires like dreamy memories and photographs that have never been taken, moments in which the feeling of freedom is particularly pronounced – reality and dream merge and form memories, associations and expectations in the viewer, as can also be found in the works of Marlene Dumas.
Unlike in the legendary Venusberg motif, where the Roman goddess of love, erotic desire and beauty lures people into the mountain with nymphs and mermaids in order to lead a sinful life and thus fall victim to damnation, or as with Eric Fischl, whose pictures of naked people are often characterised by fears and constraints, Tanja Selzer plays lightly and ironically with her motifs; no one is denounced or condemned. Rather, she claims that everyone can live their individual freedom without disapproval in the defined space, whether unobserved naked on the beach (Playing Venus) or dancing around a fire (Bonfire), making love in the forest (Lovecats, Somewhere only we know), enraptured by a forest lake (Flying) or on the back of a horse (Foam Horse, Horsy).
With effortless, fluid and lightly applied colours, the artist playfully underlines the seriousness of her works.
Tanja Selzer lives and works in Berlin, for more information click here.
Program:
Thursday, 07 March 2024, 18.00 h
Vernissage. The artist will be present.
Friday, 05 April 2024, 18.00 h
Reading with the actress REGINE ZIMMERMANN from the Deutsches Theater.
Saturday, 13 April 2024, 16.00 h
Finissage & Artist Talk.
Tanja Selzer, Wild Claims
08 March – 13 April2024
Vernissage: Thursday, 07 March 2024, 18.00 h
Where: nüüd.berlin gallery, Kronenstr. 18, 10117 Berlin-Mitte, U Stadtmitte
Open: Thursday – Saturday, 13.00 – 19.00 h