Artworks by Marita Tobner

Paint, canvas, wooden ground. Painting, gluing, layering. Signs and areas of stacked paint. And somewhere in the middle of it all, a story. That tells itself as if by itself.

Women – visible in the invisible In my artistic work, I dedicate myself to the reality of women's lives – their struggles, their courage, their fractures. I work with painting, graphics and letterpress – media that take up the physical, the resistant and the trace-like. The printing process itself – the pressing, the pressing, the repetition – is more than technology for me. It is a symbol of what many women experience: recurring patterns, social imprints, the effect of external forces on their own lives. I deal with topics that are often overlooked or suppressed: separation, loss, homelessness, forced relationships, emotional and economic dependencies, modern forms of slavery. Situations in which women are often alone, often invisible, often without a voice – and in which resistance, dignity and vulnerability nevertheless coexist.

My pictures don't tell simple stories. They are fragmentary, layered, sometimes raw. They show bodies in upheaval, faces between extinction and self-assertion, spaces in which the boundary between protection and imprisonment is blurred. I don't just want to depict – I want to set off. My art is an attempt to make the invisible visible, the repressed audible, the faded out tangible. For me, it's not about being affected, but about encounters. About the question: What do we see – when we really look?

This creates snapshots against the backdrop of accumulated experiences and experiences from everyday life, the banal and condense into stories. The works address the manifold aspects of human being, their nature and their relationships and ambivalences to and among each other. The environment, the image space can not simply be assigned to stereotypes, abstract and representational elements permeate the pictorial space and in this field of tension open the view to inner and outer experience. A powerful color scheme, the use of various stylistic means and techniques, as well as the dynamics of the graphics create new multi-layered stories with details that remain hidden from others. The works are created serially in mixed technique (acrylic, oil, wood or linocut, collage, painting and drawing).