Montamor

Marie Aly

Any direct experience of art must involve questioning the role of images that manifest materially on the basis of production cultures. Opportunities to visualise new existential fields then open up through relating this direct experience to society.

The installation by artist Marie Aly, who lives in Berlin, operat­ed within a number of referential areas, addressing an environ­ment in which questions of history and popular culture meet. The cabinet of curiosities – a conceptual icon in the presenta­tion of cultural history – offered one of the central referential frames of the exhibition in the Neue Galerie, creating a place fully in relation with the world which claimed the rights to sur­prise, to pay tribute to the rare and the curious, and to remove or disconnect its own elements.

Marie Aly’s work in recent years has approached painting and sculpture through a process of individual intuitive deci­sions, which – overlapping and flowing together – become a record of direct experiences. The work throws open the ques­tion, therefore, of how a present-day state can be illustrated, of what comprises such a moment in time, and how cultural memory, social identity and criticism are expressed in the form of images. Thus Marie Aly confronts common under-standings of culture with counter-cultural concepts and pictorial techniques, shifting the visual, the non-verbal, to the centre of contemporary lifestyles.

This interest in images that develop from themselves, from the painterly and artistic act, poses once more the question of our experience of the visual as a part of everyday life. In the main, the artist rejects conceptual considerations and sketch­es. Painterly means serve as the starting point for an intuitive composition, which creates a story from within itself, layer by layer, and so becomes part of our society.

The rooms of the Neue Galerie in the Hofburg Innsbruck, to which Marie Aly responded using a number of traditional techniques such as ceramics, painting, tapestry-work and etching, were revealed not so much as a heterotopic parallel world but as an intimate place of interrelated experiences and fragments.

Gregor Neuerer

Marie Aly *1980 in Berlin. Lives since 2010 in Berlin.
2008-10 Postgraduiertenstipendium de ateliers, Amsterdam. 2007-09 master-class pupil, Prof. Ralf Kerbach, HfBK Dresden. 2007 Erasmus Grant, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. 2006 Guest semester, Universitat de Barcelona, Facultad de Bellas Artes, Barcelona. 2002-07 Painting & Graphics, class of Prof. Ralf Kerbach. 2001/02 Hamburg Univer­sity of Applied Sciences/HAW, Illustration & Communication Design
www.mariealy.com

Opening: 21.01.2015, 19.00
Introduction: Gregor Neuerer, board member, Tiroler Künstlerschaft