The Art of Being Oneself

Who would still want to demand freedom for art today in times when anything goes, when everything is permitted.  That seems downright outmoded, antiquated, after all the many struggles for liberation that the modernist artists undertook.   However, things aren’t that simple.  For Franziska Statkus, the question about the liberation of painting was always a central and personal concern, a repetitive subject that shaped her development as an artist and which has not lost anything of its actuality. 

 In 1984, the 19 year old enrolled in the Stuttgart Academy of Fine Arts and chose set design as her subject of study.  Franziska Statkus is then soon drawn to free painting. This is the time when the “Young Wild Ones” took over the galleries and museums with verve and again made large gestures by human figures the visual focal point.  “It was sensuous, it was liberating, it seized us all”, she remembers during her first year of study, as she finally finds as an artistic alternative to the “constructed, to the intellectualism” of the academy establishment.  The influence of the Young Wild Ones on her work during these years is unmistakable, for example on the large-scale, strong female portraits during the years from 1986 to 1988.

Soon, however, Franziska Statkus feels the modish style to be a barrier: even if it smooths the way to the narrational and offers possibilities through its preference for ornamental details, the expressive gestus is not in keeping with its actual striving.  The young artist seeks a personal expression that leaves more room for atmosphere and feeling, for her dreamier side, for naiveté and melancholy. At the beginning of the nineties works emerge like “Clean-up Dumps”, Winter Picture”, “Whore during Full moon”, “Landing Approach”,  and “On Holiday” (the last of which is based on the motif of “Gilles” by Watteau and inspired by a trip to Russia). Characteristic for the works during this period are the narrative features, atmospheric denseness, as well as a picturesque joy in floral and decorative elements that build a counterbalance to the rather dark and covered palette of colours.

The idiosyncratic mixture of styles that deliberately renounce polish and chic for which Franziska Statkus, herself, decided “regardless of the consequences”,  as she says today, also brings her the in academic circles the accusation of “Folklore” and of “reactionary”.  In 1994, the young artist, together with an artist colleague, began a counterattack: “Rebellion against the Avant-garde”, was the programmatic title of an exhibition of their work, the motive was “a liberation attack against the Academy”.  Franziska Statkus did no longer want to be bossed around in her artistic work by the academic progressive ideology.

That is also now some years ago, the gun smoke of revolt has evaporated.  Following the strongly introverted phase of her creativeness, the format of the paintings by Franziska Statkus have become larger, the treatment of the themes in their structure bolder.  The emotional view of the world is now coupled with a more detached view of things.

These are accompanied by a clearer, more generous structure of the painting, which in some of the works (for example “Green Melancholy”, “Confession”, “Melancholy”) almost allegorically correspond in content.  And, more and more frequently, tones of a new lightness are to be found in the works of Franziska Statkus – “What a morning! And I have bought scones.”

Mathias Bury, 2003

Translation: Sheila Rosenthal, 2011