WIDER KONTRASTWUT: Maria Legat

In the face of the endless bombardment of information in contemporary life, Maria Legat offers a subtle resistance. The Austrian painter’s works invite an intricate engagement; they demand that viewers slow down to look deeply at the nuances and layers that infuse her process-oriented practice. 

Legat paints along the edge of abstraction and figuration, starting from a theme that gently takes shape into hybrid beings, symbols and composite landscapes. Her exploration of the fine line between the recognizable and the unrecognizable is an intentional practice to disorient the viewer. With the layers of architectural schemas, landscapes, human, animal and amorphous figures, and often a feminine figure carrying the weight of the world, the works refuse a cursory read. The artist attributes a life of their own to her works, a communicative quality, and invites a continual, renewed deciphering. The tonality of the natural pigment presents a subtle palette in shades of green and red, and she lets the pigments drip down her canvases which are nailed to the wall both during the creation and exhibition. This too is intentional – a nod to social inequalities, and a surfacing of her painting practice in the final work.

All part of the series UND ZUR LAGE DER WELT (And the State of the World) that Legat began in 2014, the exhibited works engage current events and social themes from a queer and feminist lens. Motherhood is reimagined and carrying is a central theme in many works: a burden is endured, lifted, understood, and upheld. Fascinated with structures and power and the line between the visible and the invisible, the artist sees her paintings as a way of counterbalancing the omnipresent injustice she observes in the world.