Katharina Höglinger

In her works, Katharina Höglinger draws on the realms of experience of the everyday. She selects wandering thoughts and loose interests to immediately record them on canvas or in her drawings on paper. Seeking to depict the complexity and obscurity of thoughts and its convoluted character, Höglinger portrays overlapping, entangled figures. In her painting Bird-tree, a bird seems to emerge from a face, which in turn seems to lean against a flower’s stem. While an ear drifts apart from the face, the bird and the face appear to be one alluding to a pictorial language reminiscent of cubism and expressionism in its naivety and figurative abstraction. The fogginess of the painting adds a surrealist atmosphere, while the flowers in their various articulations refer to symbols found in art history. Höglinger’s oeuvres seem to fall out of time, or to speak of a deep melancholia in which notions of time lose their meaning. What might appear as a tenderness in the various characters and motives of Höglinger’s images is equally an introspective gaze revealing the perplexity of her inner thoughts in response to the precarity of the times we live in. But if the surrealist appearances of her eccentric characters embody despondency, they also offer glimpses of ease and a rare courage to embrace imperfection.

The tree in front of my house wears a baby doll, 2023
Oil on canvas
100 × 80 cm

Self-portrait with ear sound, 2022
Oil on canvas
24 × 18 cm

Bird-tree, 2021
Oil on canvas
80 × 62 cm