Anja Ganster - BETWEEN SPACES

Galerie Jahn is showing a selection of Anja Ganster’s painting works from the last few years in its current exhibition. The painting shows a deep preference for the realistic image and the specific artistic skill of expertly presenting complex pictorial contexts realistically. The pictures have a special virtuosity in dealing with composition and colouration and produce an extremely high degree of realistic reproduction thanks to her sophisticated glazing technique.

Anja Ganster was born in Mainz (D) in 1968 and lives and works in Binningen BL (CH). Her artistic career began with a qualification in communication design and print graphics at the Akademie für Bildende Kunst in Mainz, which led to studies in painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her work was well received right from the start and can be found in a number of important museum and institutional collections today. Her work has been shown internationally in significant solo and group exhibitions, for example in the Frida Burda collection or in a comprehensive solo exhibition at the Franz Gertsch Museum in Switzerland in September. Both venues are testament to the considerable importance of her work in the context of contemporary painting. Numerous, extensive book and catalogue publications have also been published on her work.

The artist’s work includes cityscapes and architectural views, interiors, still life and landscapes. The global radius of the selected subjects is clear, reflecting her travel, work and exhibition biography. It’s public spaces that arouse her interest due to their architectural features, private living and working spaces, as well as jungle paintings that indelibly remain in the memory due to their fantastic colour and fading. It’s always a personal and subjective selection of the image and composition, far removed from any possible clichés or expectations. In the latter, it’s not important that it’s a specific jungle but that it conveys the archaic and archetypical sense of a jungle. It is not a specific private and personal space but a metaphor for the personal and private per se. And at the end of the day it’s not the airport terminal in Berlin that is of interest to the observer but the masterly pictorial metaphor for that moment of the interim, of transit.

The artist shows us masterly pictorial metaphors that personally fascinate her and reference universal states of consciousness far beyond the depicted subject shown.