Gerlind Zeilner: Cowgirls

The Austrian artist Gerlind Zeilner is interested in the ambivalence within painting towards cliché-like picture ideas influenced by a male-dominated art history. In her structurally significant and fragile, broken virtuosity, Zeilner works on figurative-abstract pictorial spaces full of critical and colorful hints about being a female painter among painters-like from women among men. In sociable scenes of being together and experiencing fictional western and real artist bars, heroic and exaggerated male gestures with a special structure of colors and shapes tend to be questioned critically and humorously and refreshed, for example in an engagement around bar pictures with Nicole Eisenman, Jörg Immendorff or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.In more recent works, she turns increasingly to inherent questions of painting and her specific relationship as an artist, which in "studio pictures" leads to a discussion of her immediate surroundings or the processing of various architectures. In doing so, she skillfully plays with a kind of provisionality and incompleteness within painting.