Conny Maier

Maier’s large-scale paintings reflect on the polarities of dominance and submission, equilibrium and instability, the human and the non-human. In Beautiful Disasters, she responds to 21st century questions of immoderation and fundamental distrust of reason with relentlessly colorful answers. Misshapen figures, seen with wide open mouths and gelatinous appendages, often multi-breasted and donned in malformed headdresses, wander through her canvases in vivid, sweeping brush strokes. Her compositions oscillate between fascination and repulsion, beauty and the grotesque, to depict life beyond the expected. Considered together, Maier’s abstractions offer an unflinching look at the end of the Holocene and the realities of our new age and ask what kind of a new day might dawn. 

Also on display in the Japan Room is the Langen Foundation’s collection of ink scroll paintings and pictures of the seasons from the Edo Period (1603-1868), a golden era of Japanese art. The exhibit includes landscape ink paintings of seasonal flowers, plants, and wildlife that represent the stylistic diversity and magnificence of the period.