Bianca Regl - Paintings

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Bianca Regl’s works are multifaceted. The figure ever plays a decisive role throughout. While in the alpine versions of her images, traditional clothing is given its importance, there are other works where holiday-makers in Italy are sitting in front of a gelateria, licking their ice-cream, or sun-bathing on a borrowed pedal boat in the sea: a sensitive observation of everyday life evolves into the basis of the young artist’s repertoire. Accordingly, the subtlety of her work does not reside in her graphically exact, miniature-like technical execution alone. It might almost be said that Bianca Regl brings the tradition of medieval illumination in the manner of the Frères de Limbourg up to date through a day-to-day kind of realism to be found in the works of other young contemporary painters.

In her Friday-series, Bianca Regl takes on the modulations of the female body. On the darkly primed ground material she uses a range of colors consisting only of shades of pink. By means of these tender colors she molds the bodies of her girlfriends on canvas, through the contrast of light and dark. The movements of her brush seem vehement, gestural. Forcefulness as well as sensitivity are shown at the same time by the way that color is applied. In her water images, Bianca Regl moves away from this reduced range of colors: bodies that are moving in a swimming-pool covered by light - colored tiles, wet patches of skin and the rays of the sun reflected in the water are the themes of this series. The refraction of light in the water and the distortion of bodies plunged into it are symbolized on canvas by means of gestural brush-strokes. Seen from close-by, some of these watery mirroring seem almost abstract. Color, brushwork and canvas are and rest the main parameters of Bianca Regl’s art, the realism of her imaginary world notwithstanding. This link to a self referential way of painting can be recognized in her landscape images. Chains of mountains and conifers are entering into a symbiosis and, in their apparent realism, will not represent anything but this: pure painting.