I’m still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human.¹

 ‘Abstraction is hot’ read a headline in a prominent English-speaking newspaper not long ago, making the reader believe that abstraction – a mere style – had gained the upper hand in figuration in the rapidly changing seasons of the art world. Reducing a movement as ideologically loaded as abstraction to a mere short-lived trend sounds like a postmodern ruse, aimed at deconstructing a coherent narrative of 20th-century western art history. Abstract painters and critics glorified abstraction as a means to transcend reality, freeing painting from a relation to the world for the sake of the non-representational image.

Barnett Newman, a prominent Abstract Expressionist, sought to achieve the sublime in a heroic gesture by which his paintings generated a profound emotional and spiritual response in the viewer. In his search for audacious formal inventions the immediacy of expression was paramount as was the purity of colour-dominated fields. In the wake of Abstract Expressionism, these concerns were pushed further to a point where abstract painting became an entirely self-referential entity, non-objective and timeless, eliminating any visual reference outside of the painting.

Contemporary painter Maria Marika Koenig, whose series EVERYTHING IS COLOUR situates itself within the realm of abstraction, is – as is any serious painter – embedded in this historic trajectory that defines a crucial moment in modernism. Aware of the ideological burden, the focus of Marika’s practice lies in redefining abstraction by breaking away from its narrow confines, calling into doubt the epistemic difference between abstract and representational imagery. No more a means to transcend reality, abstraction for her blurs the boundaries between the two categories. Rooting abstraction as firmly as figuration in the world we live in, she deploys similar methods across her practice, dissolving the subject matter of her figurative paintings with the same dynamic, horizontally directed brushstrokes used in her abstract paintings. It is with elegance and ease that she alternates between the two, overcoming their long established dichotomy and mutual exclusiveness. One could call her a ‘hybrid’ painter, as she simultaneously retains elements of the Abstract Expressionist movement, such as the importance given to process and the immediacy of expression.

Walking into Marika’s Mumbai studio, one is reminded of an alchemist’s laboratory, where sand, glass stones, foils, porcelain and embroideries are turned into material for her paintings – material that is imbued with history and meaning, ‘contaminating’ the ideal of pure abstraction with its emphasis on the anti-historic and the self-referential. Standing before the medium- to large-scale panels, the viewer is intrigued by the luminosity of colours and the complex and daring viscosity of the textures. In some paintings, such as Anywhere But Dialogue glass stones sit atop the paint, reminiscent of crystals that reflect and refract light but also recalling – in an ironic twist – their purposes of healing and spirituality. The glass stones add a three-dimensionality to the paintings that correlates with the spatial depth created in other areas. In a continuous process of creation and destruction, layers of oil paint are developed and partly scraped off, simultaneously masking and revealing earlier traces – much like in a palimpsest, where previous writing was scraped off to make room for another text, leaving faint remains underneath.

A recurrent element in Marika’s abstract panels is the grid-like structure comprising vertical and horizontal movements that run through the picture plane. It is as if the unbounded energies of the brushstroke need to be tamed in the dynamic process of creation. In an attempt at spatial organization, the ‘logic’ of the grid allows for a construction that holds the opposite movements in a precarious equilibrium. It also contains the cascading of colours across the canvas – colours that stir the entire gamut of emotions, from sombre to joyous, from restless to disconcertingly calm. In western art history the grid has been positioned as an ‘emblem’ of modern abstraction, representing order and the autonomy of an aesthetic field that does not acknowledge a world beyond the frame. In her seminal essay ‘Grids’, Rosalind Krauss defines the grid as ‘anti natural, anti mimetic, anti real […] crowding out the dimensions of the real. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.’²

Although Marika deploys the grid as a rational device to organize the pictorial space in a way similar to the modernists, she loosens its regimented geometry and questions its function as a model for the anti real. In her paintings the horizontal lines clearly demarcate the sky, while the vertical lines allude to rays of light and reflection, almost generating an illusionistic effect. What we see is not the abstraction of a real landscape, but the meditation on both landscape and abstract painting itself. The idea of a landscape, such as it appears before the mind’s eye or surfaces from the recesses of memory, is rendered with a mastery of nuance and fluidity. Wave-like forms and the intricate palette of shades of blue call to mind the Aegean Sea and a profusion of Mediterranean light. The atmosphere of such landscapes, the moods and emotions that they trigger, are dissolved into the painterly evocation of infinity – an infinity that reminds us of the diminished human presence set amid the expansiveness of nature.

Marika’s painterly practice follows in the footsteps of none other than the eminent German painter Gerhard Richter, who stated in an interview that an abstract painting has to be constructed like a piece of nature, as coherent and convincing. He made a plea to overcome the heroic ‘falsity’ of abstraction in which all references to the external world are at odds with its purity. This ‘falsity’ has been detected equally by Rosalind Krauss,³ who has criticized the minimalist Ad Reinhardt for betraying his ideal of pure abstraction by introducing the motif of the Greek cross in his celebrated series, Black Paintings. The ‘schizophrenic’ nature of abstraction, to negate any visual reference outside the aesthetic field by simultaneously drawing on it, sheds light on the way an abstract painting is perceived.

As Richter points out, the viewer, searching for meaning in an abstract painting, looks for something ‘recognizable’ that can be related to an experience or object in the world: ‘one cannot help seeing things in even the most abstract paintings.’⁴ Thus, their reading invariably leads to an external source. In this sense, Richter considers the departure point the same in both abstract and figurative painting with the appearance of figurative forms in abstract works. The main difference between abstraction and figuration is that the former allows for greater freedom in experimenting with pictorial means. As a radical site for the articulation of what cannot be fully described, it manifests itself as the entry point to the realm of the unknown, even the mysterious.

Having studied the craft of painting at the reputed J. J. School of Art, Mumbai, Marika has developed considerable skill in experimenting with materials, as when she mixes gesso as a base with the sand she imports from Greece, her homeland, washing and sieving it to achieve the desired size of grain; or when she adds dammar resin to oil paint to arrive at a viscous texture that can be easily dragged with a squeegee across the canvas. Other than the brush, the squeegee allows for less control and more experimentation, depending on the angle and pressure applied. Some of the reds, yellows, oranges, blues, greens and purples are presented by large brushstrokes and some are applied by using fingers or makeshift tools that allow for further spontaneous exploration of the paint, provoking unpredictable results that enrich the overall composition with erasures, interruptions and pentimenti.

Several paintings show colours that remain separate in some areas and blended elsewhere. Streaks and smears disrupt the rhythm of the horizontal and vertical lines by running in the opposite direction. Often foil is worked into the layers of paint, only to be removed later to achieve brittle patches and indentations. In paintings, such as NOWHERE BUT AFTERNOON the canvas is laid bare at the edges. By juxtaposing the even surface of the unpainted canvas with the saturated texture of the painted field, a framing device within the painting is created. For Marika, painting is a highly physical and energetic process, a performance-like activity, which transforms the canvas into an ‘arena in which to act – rather than a space in which to reproduce’. In the sequence of movements, where progression and stillness are held at equilibrium, the chasm between painting as object and painter as subject is closed. The viewer is invited to intensively experience the work, both physically and emotionally, stabilizing a connection between his body and the painting before ultimately connecting his self with nature.

Marika’s non-hierarchical treatment of abstraction and figuration is echoed in her equal treatment of colour. In the series EVERYTHING IS COLOUR no colour or shade gains predominance over the other, despite the wide range of their symbolic connotations and figurative importance. This ‘democratic’ ideal of assigning equal importance to each and every element within the painting and to every painting of the series, springs from her staunch belief in universal rights which, irrespective of nationality, colour, religion and gender, are essential to all human beings. In an era when conceptually driven political art that decries aesthetic pleasure as a bourgeois remnant is considered the only voice to comment on the world’s deep divisions and crises, Marika deploys purely painterly means to take an unequivocal stance. Similar to celebrated painter Luc Tuymans, whose figurative paintings create ‘memorable images of injustice and terror’, she asserts the power of painting as a means to uphold the principle of equality that she sees so often betrayed in today’s politics.

The series EVERYTHING IS COLOUR allows the viewer the freedom of undisturbed immersion in a pictorial continuum, where the splendour of light and the vastness of infinity call for contemplation. In Buddhist terms, contemplation is a state of ‘mindfulness’, known as sati, and manifests itself as non-judgemental attentiveness to everything that is perceived. This ‘mindfulness’ mirrors the principle Marika follows to accord equal importance to each and every element in her paintings. Contemplation is also a state, in which the hustle and bustle of life is suspended and chaos is turned into stillness. It is in these moments that the eye of the beholder is arrested, ready to indulge in the aesthetic pleasure of beauty. Unlike Barnett Newman, who declared the standards of beauty as irrelevant, and many contemporary painters, whose stress on concept is rooted in a distrust of beauty, Marika celebrates the triumph of beauty in her paintings. As a supreme law of art and a necessary human condition, beauty allows for an experience that ultimately connects the natural and the spiritual, the sensuous and the rational. It induces in the viewer a spirit of ‘wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love, and a trembling that is all delight.’⁵

Birgid Uccia

¹ Gerhard Richter in conversation with Nicolas Serota, in Gerhard Richter | Panorama, exhibition catalogue (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), p. 15.

² Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Grids’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 9–22.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Gerhard Richter, op. cit., p. 124.

⁵ Plotinus 23 [Ennead 1, 3], in Plotinus, The Six Enneads, trans. Stephen McKenna & B. S. Page (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Publishing, 1952).

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