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 grooming depicts 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.