FROM JULY 29 - AUGUST 28, KUNSTVEREIN HEILBRONN IS CLOSED!!! A visit of the exhibition is possible by appointment One of the distinctive qualities of Solweig de Barry’s painting (*1987 in Strasbourg, lives and works in Berlin) is the balance between suggestion and formulation, conceptual distance and intuition, between representation and abstraction. The artist uses personal photographs as the starting point for her works. She works on these motifs in a process of deconstruction, initially as drawings on paper and then on the white primed canvas. The pictorial motifs on the photographs are abstracted, reassembled or, in some cases, simply omitted in the process of transformation. This results in a fragmentary, gestural style of painting that is at once suggestive and formally present. She thereby provides insights into the working process, allowing corrections and overpainting to be seen. The creative process is visible and yet remains rather enigmatic. The intellectual exploration of painting in terms of its motifs, color surfaces, forms and lines, the painting process and the respective gestures is furthermore reflected in her serious and, at the same time, playful experimentation with materials. In Heilbronn she shows ca. 20 paintings.
The exhibition in Heilbronn will present works on canvas as well as a site-specific painting on the large window panes of the Kunstverein. Solweig de Barry sought to find a way to realize this painting on glass panes in situ with paint that has the same translucent quality as classic glass art, because most commercially available paints, such as finger paints or varnishes, applied to glass panes actually cast a grey or black shadow on the floor. The process for glass painting that she has now developed by experimenting with paints and varnishes opens up the possibility of extending two-dimensional painting into the space, working with reflections and repetitions, while integrating the movement of the sun and the light.