Petra Flierl – The Wall Gallery

NEW WORK

May 16, 2024 to June 30, 2024

Press Release March 28, 2024

PETRA FLIERL

NEW WORK

The Wall Gallery is proud to announce Petra Flierl, NEW WORK.

-And new work it is-. After being a painter for fifty years Petra’s first single show at the Wall Gallery features digital prints on paper. Derived from photos of her oil paintings these computer graphically altered hybrids paint with- and against the machine. The images are as Petra as it gets- and always was- powerful.

Come and enjoy the show at:

The Wall Gallery

41 Seabring Street

Brooklyn, NY 11231

Tel. 718 781 8263

From:

May 16, 2024 to June 30, 2024

Opening Reception:

May 16. From 6pm to 10pm

Petra Flierl, New Work
By Scott Pfaffman, March 28, 2924

Petra Flierl was born, lives and works in what was East Berlin, the part of the city where the tram tracks still rattle. Her father was a prominent architect and her mother an important textile designer. Petra, born in ’54, is from the generation of the new German: Complex, Visionary and Female. When Adorno wrote to Walter Benjamin; “Isn’t the aura the trace of the forgotten humanism in the thing?” he might have referred to the post war aura of an unfolding future. A reviewer once suggested that Petra was essentially a portraitist. But this is portraiture to a transformative new state; She involves her subjects in the present with a complex history that, unlike Kiefer’s desiccated shards, is one that describes whole new worlds born into whole new characters. And this gestation is not merely an abstraction, it is made concrete on the canvas. Rebirth is everywhere. In Flierl’s newly minted digital drawings her insatiable desire to discover essences, of this ovarian world are displayed in a unified field. 13 works on paper, like flotsam just above the floodwater marks in the low ceilinged gallery. They manifest an Eden like environment. The colors shape the space. These images are in a state of natality, as though not yet completely realized, with some slight of focus, as if registration, the complete process of inception to birth has yet happened. And we are witness. At The Wall Gallery opening May 16th 2024.

From ‘Traces of the forgotten humanity in the human’, a catalogue text by Anke Paula Boettcher in 2019:

“…She uses mostly photos from the press as templates for her paintings.”

A quote from Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin from a letter in 1940:

‘Isn’t the aura the trace of the forgotten humanism in the thing?’

“Something about the image talkies to the unconscious/ subconscious, topples it and corresponds with the punctum.”

“In this translatory work- a sort of a transformation, a magical reproduction and redesign of the reproduction, from the punctum to the auratic creation of the image, lies the creative power of Petra Flierl.” “In general one could say she is a portraitist.”