For Tanja Pohl (*1985), painting means engagement; it means grappling with the world; it means not being content with the appearance of things, but rather revealing what civilisation has only superficially concealed. This is evident in the striking industrial landscapes of her early years – wounded, desecrated landscapes – in her »human-machines«, hybrid beings, cyborgs of a dystopian future or even the present, as well as in her heads, skulls and animal skulls, and most recently in her current depictions of the body, in which she questions the image and role of women in society.

The female body, for centuries a canvas for patriarchal fear, becomes a battleground of misogyny and control – bound, tied up, gagged, chastised. And here too – a credo of the artist – deformation becomes an image of damage, an iconography of trauma and experiences of violence. The eponymous motif of the new body of work »Verschnürt« – the binding, constriction and entanglement – also reveals, beyond the feminist context, the limits of our freedom, our autonomy and self-determination.

Tanja Pohl makes things difficult not only for herself but also for her paintings. In a spirit of exploration, she penetrates the body of the painting, seemingly deepening it, scraping at it and wounding it. Sometimes she visually breaks up the painting until its surfaces shatter, and gives new stability to drifting fragments and shards. At other times, she builds and layers, adds, applies, presses thick, impasto lumps of paint into the fabric of the painting, and collages and applies foreign objects, materials, fabrics and scraps. In this way, some paintings become reliefs that can be experienced tactilely, revealing themselves to be more vulnerable and accessible.

For Tanja Pohl, painting is an energy-sapping process. Construction and deconstruction, building and destroying, collage and décollage characterise this essentially dialectical way of working. The artist sometimes leaves the traces of the creative process visible, revealing her methods and approaches. This gives rise to an aesthetic of deconstruction, a mimesis of pain, which—both in the painting process that remains visible and in the painted object itself—provides a response to the pictorial subjects and their demands, so that a sense of being affected that is almost physically palpable can be experienced.