IN-BETWEEN BY MARIA WÆHRENS
Chris Sharp Gallery, 4650 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016, USA
The recent work of Maria Wæhrens, a longtime, if idiosyncratic fixture of the Danish art scene, could be considered a form of contemporary religious or spiritual painting. Where her earlier work revolved much more around issues of lesbian identity and representations thereof, the last few years have seen Wæhrens turn more toward attempts at describing a personal spiritual experience in the form of quasi-figurative and decidedly ethereal abstraction. Characterized by strident, gestural maelstroms of hot color from which figures occasionally emerge, the resultant paintings can be situated in a trajectory that looks back to Cobra, Asger Jorn and Marisa Merz, not to mention European expressionism and symbolism, which includes everyone from Edvard Munch to Odilon Redon. It is as if she is inserting herself into a tradition of painting, which not only is arguably dead or inadmissible (spiritual abstraction), but which also has been, at least historically, foreclosed to the likes of her. In doing so, she carries out a series of transgressions and revives this tradition from an entirely different perspective, looking at how contemporary abstraction can exist on the threshold of the sensuous material world and the aspirational metaphysical plane with which it was once so closely associated.
