German artist Conny Maier explores fundamental questions about human nature, ecology, dominance, and control. The off-kilter figuration in Maier’s paintings, coupled with the inter-species entanglements that her work depicts, articulate precarity and vulnerability as elemental states of being. Her painterly reflections on polarities like dominance and submission, equilibrium and instability, the human and the non-human take an unflinching look at the final throes of the Anthropocene, asking not only what should come to an end but what kind of new day might dawn.

Conny Maier lives and works in Berlin and Baleal, Portugal. She was selected as one of the three recipients of Deutsche Bank’s prestigious Artists of the Year Prize in 2021. Her recent expansive solo exhibition Beautiful Disasters was curated by Udo Kittelmann at the Langen Foundation. Her first monograph was published on the occasion of this show. Her work has recently been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues including Art Basel Unlimited 2023, Basel; De 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg; Palais Populaire, Berlin; MUDEC, Milan; and at Museum Frieder Burda, Baden Baden.

Société is pleased to announce Drowning, Conny Maier’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Water and fluids are central themes in the artist’s works, appearing in scenes where they gush from human bodies, spill from urns, or serve as the backdrop for enigmatic bathing scenes. Maier’s newest paintings take an even more pronounced aquatic turn, delving into the notion of drowning—which evokes associations with the subconscious, a loss of control, and the dissolution of the self—as an immersion in the deep, primal aspects of the psyche. In his text Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard describes various symbolic characteristics of water: limpid clarity, purity, reverie. Yet beyond its life-giving, nurturing, and cyclical qualities, he also identifies the dynamic force of what he deems “violent water”—“the flux and reflux of an anger that rumbles and reverberates.” Maier’s recent works seethe with an electric intensity. The work Veneninsuffizienz, which roughly translates as “vein insufficiency,” shows a gargantuan nude figure sitting amidst a landscape of lurid orange trees and purple and red puddles who aggressively thrusts their arm into a blue urn as if seeking a vital transfusion. In paintings like Nudisten im Wald or Nudist mit Blumen figures take shelter in landscapes that seem tinged with an overpowering red glow. Die grosse Wäsche/The groomingdepicts two brilliant orange figures dousing a person who crouches below them with sprays of water that forcefully spout from their mouths, an enigmatic scene that resembles both a hazing ritual and a peculiar ecstatic baptism.

While both the subject matter and bold color palette of this new body of work may recall historical bathing scenes by artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Maier’s figures by no means reference an idealized, uncorrupted state of humanity. They are ambiguous, flawed distillates of the human condition, as conflicted and greedy as they are nurturing and compassionate. Their nudity signifies less a return to “nature” or a romantic ethos of a pre-modern life than a person stripped down to their essences: the good, the bad, and the ugly. For Maier, the metaphor of drowning—whether depicted literally or gestured towards—signifies the overwhelming nature of disaster, whether personal, political, or ecological. Yet, within this turmoil, she also finds the potential for renewal: the possibility of emerging from the depths reborn, cleansed, and transformed.

The Langen Foundation is pleased to present Beautiful Disasters, Conny Maier’s first comprehensive institutional exhibition. The exhibition will be on display from 3 September 2023 through 7 April 2024 at the former NATO base in Hombroich, which housed Pershing missiles during the Cold War. Curated by Udo Kittelmann, who has frequently worked with Maier, the show will be made up of a series of images created especially for this exhibition and of the artist’s earlier works.

Maier’s large-scale paintings reflect on the polarities of dominance and submission, equilibrium and instability, the human and the non-human. In Beautiful Disasters, she responds to 21st century questions of immoderation and fundamental distrust of reason with relentlessly colorful answers. Misshapen figures, seen with wide open mouths and gelatinous appendages, often multi-breasted and donned in malformed headdresses, wander through her canvases in vivid, sweeping brush strokes. Her compositions oscillate between fascination and repulsion, beauty and the grotesque, to depict life beyond the expected. Considered together, Maier’s abstractions offer an unflinching look at the end of the Holocene and the realities of our new age and ask what kind of a new day might dawn.

A ‘source’ is where a stream of water begins, but it is also a word that refers to a kind of generative force: a cause, a point of origin, an initiator. All of these meanings permeate Conny Maier’s large-scale diptych The Source, whose ambivalence is heightened by the unclear relationships between the painting’s figures. There is a peculiar timelessness to The Source, and the scenes it depicts could just as easily take place in the distant past as in a brave new world future. Its pastoral setting, archetypal subject matter, and vibrant colors are unsettled by the misshapen figures that inhabit the landscape – and threaten to tear this world asunder. Yet, their warped bodies can also be read as a testament to the perpetual struggle of finding balance in an ever-changing world.

Conny Maier did not originally specialize in painting, yet she felt always drawn to it, creating various de-individualized characters she had invented; with open mouths and jelly feet, captured with vibrant colors in swirling brushstrokes, wandering through canvases often encompassing nature. To focus on Maier’s paintings of flowers and vases is to return - in a way - to the origins of her art: Her paintings are a colorful cosmos shifting between sublime beauty and the grotesque.

For her exhibition at De 11 Lijnen curated by Udo Kittelmann, the artist continues her exploration of nature concentrating on placing bouquets of flower pieces in vases or full blooms without vases and then again vases without colorful flora at all. Still life remains a feature in her series that brings to mind and perhaps leaves us with a question: “Can one paint flowers today?” Looking at Conny Maier paintings, the answer is a definite “yes.”

Ever since the Impressionist artists like Vincent van Gogh adopted flower vases as his subject and Paul Cézanne painted a famous series of still lifes with basket of apples resting on layered tablecloths, and there is of course Claude Monet’s Les Nymphéas series, the still life and painting flowers continuous to remain a popular feature in art movements. Composed of a combination of oil, oil stick and pigments on canvas, Conny Maier’s paintings created for her first exhibition at the space for contemporary art in Oudenburg, are - one can say - a continuation of this “tradition” and yet at the same time, it is more than that: it is a collection of ideas inspired by and collected from her travels around the world, which Maier first sketches in a notebook and then transforms on canvases –– some are large, others are small depictions of bold and whimsical imagery of life beyond the ordinary.

In Feels like rabies, Maier presents a series of new paintings that explore fundamental questions about human nature, ecology, dominance, and control. The works are populated by figures who seem out of sync with their environment, as if they might topple over at any moment in their cruel struggle for ascendancy over nature and other beings. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes of the “ambivalence of salvage,” how damaged worlds nonetheless contain an abundance of life, beauty, resilience, and the potential for dynamic new alliances between different life forms—and Maier’s paintings unflinchingly delve into this space between destruction and renewal.

Conny Maier narrative paintings portray extreme psychological states through a style of contorted figuration that verges on caricature. In Dynamik, nine figures come together to form a pulsating mass: a jumble of bodies, hands pulling fabric, and long rivers of tears. The figures who inhabit the work convey an ambiguous bundle of emotions—they could be experiencing paroxysms of extreme grief, struggling to inflict pain upon one another, or both. The term dynamic indicates a form of continuous and productive activity or change and Maier nods towards the delicate balance between anguish and brutality in many of her paintings. There is a peculiar timeless to Maier’s work and the scenes that she depicts are almost impossible to place: they could just as easily exist in some not-so-distant past as a brave new world future. Their pastoral settings lend them a folkloric quality that is unsettled by the figures who inhabit these landscapes—and threaten to tear this world asunder. And yet, their deformed bodies can also be read as a testament to the perpetual struggle of finding beauty and balance in a constantly changing world. Umstände depicts a highly cropped view of a crouching figure with two snakes biting their bottom. Her strangely elongated buttocks seem to indicate that she is in a state of vegetal transformation, blossoming like inverted tulips. In Rabies, a woman stands in a golden field with a rabbit dangling from her hand. A small puncture wound glistens on her thumb, indicating the inflamed delirium and collapse to follow. The off-kilter figuration in Maier’s works, coupled with the inter-species entanglements that they depict, articulate precarity and vulnerability as elemental states of being. As Lowenhaupt Tsing writes of living and attempting to thrive in a contaminated world, “Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others.“