Brigitte Oberlik-Burtscher

I started drawing and painting at an early age. It was my way of communication, speaking with colors and pencils, observation of my surrounding, formulation of feelings.

My paintings were and are voice and echo. I was influenced by different painters. A note from those early years still tells me today that I wanted
to explore everything myself: reduction and opulence, density and lightness, naturalism and abstraction.

Contradictions and opposites still interest me - beauty and destruction, light and shadow, seriousness and play. Together with the choice of materials, this makes my painting diverse - I use watercolor, acrylic, oil, pigments, I make monotypes, sometimes I mix materials and experiment with various types of paper.

An occasion or an idea may lead to a small series, but I prefer to follow different traces that I perceive - hues, contrasts, textures or lines, or the emotions that emerge while working. Sometimes, however, I am simply driven by the desire for bold brushstrokes.

I prefer abstract paintings, but there are also paintings in which colors, shapes and silhouettes emerge from the depths of my memories and condense into fictional places or impressions of nature, where nature is not just abstracted landscape, but rather its character, the silence, the vastness, the light, a horizon ...

The experimental, the individual freedom that painting allows me, the joy of abstract composition, the energy that arises when painting, the reflection that is felt in the images, all this fascinates me in each work.