TINKA BECHERT - Statement

Although Tinka Bechert works almost exclusively in Oil paint on canvas, her paintings appear collage-like. These painted "assemblages" are an ongoing exploration of an precariously balanced interplay of colour, painting and drawing and of abstraction and figuration.  

Fragments and impressions of figuration, float in gestural abstract colour-fields.  The artist creates a painted patchwork of contemporary life, recycled and reclaimed imagery, graphic descriptions such as maps and technical drawings, accidental effects such as paint drips and line drawings interweave in fragile and dynamic relationships.  Suggestions of landscapes, people and objects appear. The paintings carry an inner tension that derives from the sensitive juxtaposition of abstraction and realism, aesthetics and the mundane  - art and life.

During Bechert's recently awarded residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, she set out on an "expedition" furthering her  ongoing interest in graphic descriptions such as maps, history of map-making and exploration of new surroundings. Starting with drawings of sea faring navigation maps and other such descriptions of the actual environment, she then went on to develop a much more intuitive response to her environment in which only fragments of scientific or pictoral descriptions remain.The paintings explore the divide between media coverage of places (such as National Parks and inherant romantic notions of the sublime in human concepts of nature), perhaps generally means of quasi-scientific (so called "objective") descriptions of our environment, and our very own "direct"  and personal experience.

In this most recent work, Tinka Bechert is moving  into a more spatially challenging treatment of the two dimensions of the surface of canvas. By rendering floating objects in undefined spaces, and by combining different points of view , traditional perspective is challenged equally as much as "traditional" abstract painting is. An almost dizzying tension between flat areas of paint and illusions of perspective emerges in this suspended pictoral reality.

These painterly juxtapositions corresponds with the paradoxical reality of our contemporary living experience. Tinka Becherts work raises questions about individuality and perception, randomness and the multidimensional reality of the fast paced navigation of contemporary living. In slow, ancient oil & pigment.  Exploration of everyday contradictions.