Maria Köfler

Maria Köfler’s primary artistic medium is drawing. She works on paper with ink, pencil, ballpoint pen, felt-tip, red chalk, chalk, and crayon, to create a surreal, bizarre pictorial world whose complexity defies clear legibility. Based on personal experiences and observations, Köfler transfers social themes such as “eating and being eaten”, greed and fear, fairness and justice to the animal world to reflect human sensitivities on a symbolically charged level.
Delicately drawn insects and critters such as flies, mantises, or slugs populate her works and interact against abstractly painted backgrounds. The viewer shudders at fragmented body parts and heads with disturbed, distorted facial expressions; elaborately designed ornaments allude to the traditions of art and craft and remind us of art nouveau-like tendril and frame elements. At the same time, contemporary motifs and symbols of our multimedia reality are repeatedly interspersed. Köfler wants to tell ambiguous stories. She plays with (pre)judgments, visual habits, and contradictions. The gruesome mixes with the decorative; sketch-like elements contrast with hyper-realist drawings. But the seemingly unpleasant animals can also be useful – aesthetically repulsive at first glance but beautiful if viewed from a different angle.