Twist

Two extracts from the text “Mara Mattuschka asks Mara Mattuschka on the occasion of the exhibition “Twist”:

I: This figure also “twists”, doesn’t it? It seems to be spinning on its axis.

MM: Or the viewer goes around it.

I: And there is nothing around it?

MM: Just vibrating ether and desert sand. The figure is out of context, so to speak. It is its own context.

I: In the spectrum of the diversity of your metamorphoses, does the body sometimes seem powerful or embryonic?

MM: Sometimes affected, sometimes stoically centered. At once human and animal. The body is a direct presence that does not need language.

(…)

I: Then I am speechless. Yet the paintings reveal an attempt to communicate. They want to tell us something, it seems to me.

MM: Hm, yes, the paintings hide secrets.

I: But do you know their secrets?

MM: I think everyone can discover their own secret in them. A painting and the viewer form a unity that never repeats itself.

I: And you didn‘t consciously put the secret in?

MM: No, the pictures have a life of their own, independent of me.

I: When they are made, or from the beginning?

MM: Almost from the beginning. I paint around until the picture shows me what it needs.