08.11. - 16.12.2021 | extended until 29.01.2022

Wunschmaschinen - Maria Wirth

Galerie feinart berlin

Niebuhrstraße 71, 10629 Berlin

www.feinart-berlin.de

“It breathes, warms, eats. It sucks, it fucks. The Es ... Everywhere there are machines in the truest sense of the word: machines of machines, with their clutches and gears. An organ machine connected to a source machine: the current produced by this one is interrupted by the other. The breast is a machine for making milk, and the mouth machine is linked to it. The mouth of the person without appetite stands between an eating machine, an anal machine, a speaking machine, a breathing machine (asthma attack). In this sense everyone is a hobbyist; everyone has his own little machines.“ (Deleuze/ Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I)

Maria Wirth's (* 1987) painting is about corporeality, identity and interpersonal realities. Her color-intensive, abstract pictorial spaces house human and animal bodies, which, as concise as they may appear at first glance, close up at the same time and conceal deep contradictions. The artist, who received her M.A. Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, in her work she repeatedly deals with femininity and eroticism — a subtle eroticism that touches more on existential aspects than on lust and passion. In her independent imagery, she explores ambivalent feelings and values that are contrary to the simple logic of opposites such as man-woman, power-impotence, perpetrator-victim, love-hate, young-old.

With the title “Wunschmaschinen” (English „Wish machines“), Maria Wirth puts her work from 2021 in the light of a psychological-structuralist critique of capitalism and consumption in the mind of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is, for example, our desiring unconsciousness, which tends towards self-satisfaction, production and consumption the real demiurge, the real capitalist of this world? It is no coincidence that animals and chimeras appear again and again in the artist's pictures, which she creates as alter-ego of the sensual as well as the unconscious dimensions of humans, in which animal and human, instinct and reason merge.