In her solo exhibition Fluctuations the visual artist Theodora Hartmann presents a series of abstract, mixed-media works that examine the deepest levels of human consciousness, both personal and collective. Her expressive means seem to have crystallized through her many years of experience in both teaching and creating art, which has led her in recent years to draw her inspiration from the authentic sources of the unconscious mind. Interpreting Heraclitus’s phrase “panta rhei” (everything flows) through her various combinations of colors, shapes, textures, and lines, and the complexity of the visual phenomena she has captured in her compositions, the artist seeks smaller or larger testimonies of an eternally changing world that is born from chaos, finds balance, is overturned, and returns to it, only to begin a cycle anew. In the inner landscapes of her works, the inexhaustible interrelationships between composition and meaning mirror the limitlessness of the manifest and hidden aspects of the organic world and the human condition.

At an initial glance, the style of these works displays the influence from Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Using the collage technique, Hartmann cuts the papers into various shapes and sizes, arranges them, and glues them to the surface of the canvas in a continuous process of fragmentation, recomposition, juxtaposition, and final coexistence. In front of her works, the viewer’s gaze initially shifts across their surface, alert to the juxtapositions and contrasts of colors, the heterogeneous or uniform movements, and the fixed or implied forms. The fluid, ever-evolving state of the works may well be the primary reason they so powerfully and convincingly convey the sense that we are faced with paradoxically familiar images of the natural world—cosmogonic, emerging from the depths of the earth, at once human and otherworldly, archetypal, primordial, and interwoven with the origins of life.

Hartmann’s compositions aim at an interpretation of the fine balance between a logical and an emotional approach. The result is works that simultaneously constitute both the small fragments and the countless extensions of a larger whole, microcosms that mirror parallel cosmic formations, real and imaginary elements that coexist, and condensations of free associations, that at any moment will transform into new kinds of existence.

Catalogue (PDF File 4Mb)