Excerpts from the inaugural address at »Atelier neun«, Mainz, Germany 01/26/2008

Siegfried Räth, artist

” […] She wants to create pictures that do not need any explanation. At the same time, however, she confronts us with pictures in which quite obviously a story is inherent, but to discover and understand this story keys seem to be necessary. Is intention and realisation a contradiction in Anna Bieler’s art?

The confrontation of two figures, the kind of their encounter on a projection surface is always associated with something that has to be interpreted – our own experience of life enables us to recognise looks, postures and gestures, in short: all signs of a person’s communication with us or with others. In most cases we simply do not decipher these signs very thoroughly and often one cannot find clear words for what was recently experienced. A picture art, on the contrary, never comes to a standstill.

Here we get the chance to see in detail what’s going on. Because in the pictures of Anna Bieler the obvious never can be seen on the surface that one might dismiss as “fantastic” too hastily, since her way of abstracting forms and her kind of colouring leads us intentionally to think that way.

Although we know that figures from myths of the most different cultures appear in the pictures, this should not tempt us to consider Bieler as a mere reproducer. Her pictures go deep as soon as we have deciphered them and have reached the point for whose achieving we needed no explanation apart from our talent for observation: at this stage, the bright colours begin to depress me now, smiling faces raise a remaining distrust in me, I am standing there, amazed, in front of the ambiguity of the events and its symbols in the picture that, after a long period of commanding observation, set me in a feeling tension.

I know that an artist needs a great internal energy to achieve such a tension. […] “