Paintings

"Waldstücke" (Forest Pieces or also Pieces of Woodland) is the title of Barbara Petzold's second solo exhibition in our gallery. In her most recent works the Düsseldorf artist is engaged in investigating the pictorial space of nature. Again, the focus is upon ephemeral light reflexes, which, in contrast to previous works, do not appear in hazy settings - rooms, street corners, or bars - but rather in the forest, in a clearing or a chaparral. Here, a mysterious effect is created not so much due to the indefinable quality of the depicted situation, but rather due to the strangeness of the pictorial elements and composition.

"Blondes Gift" (Blonde Bombshell or Blonde Poison) depicts a woman wearing a white dress and red shoes, who is cowering in a clearing next to a group of poisonous red mushrooms dotted with white spots on the verge of picking a red flower. The shoes and the faceless head of blonde curls introduce an almost classic feature into this dreamy scenario. A similar atmosphere is evoked in the work "Blattlaus" (Greenfly) where the oddly animate gaze of the insect represented in oversized dimensions between dark leaves contrasts with elegant white-pink calyxes. Or also in the work "Paarlauf" (Pair Walking), where two slim figures dressed in black are represented walking towards the dusky horizon through tall tree trunks. The particular technique the artist employs in the meantime has become her trademark: up to sixty thin layers of diluted paint repeatedly applied in one direction with a broad brush, in which the figures are frequently overpainted with the background color, render curiously blurry representations which have a special effect in the twilight, where the figures become almost three-dimensional.

Barbara Petzold, born in 1971, studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, primarily in the class of Prof. Rissa. She participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions: among other venues in Düsseldorf (BBK, Handwerkskammer, Kö-Galerie, and Galerie Christine Hölz), Minden (Galerie culture & economies), Hamburg (Galerie Hengevoss-Dürkop), Koblenz (Kunsthalle), Emmerich (Schlösschen Borghese), and in Munich (Camera artis).