Conny Maier: Beautiful Disasters

The Langen Foundation is pleased to present Beautiful Disasters, Conny Maier’s first comprehensive institutional exhibition. The show will be on display from September 3, 2023 through April 7, 2024 at the former NATO base in Hombroich, which housed Pershing missiles during the Cold War. Curated by Udo Kittelmann, who has frequently worked with Maier, Beautiful Disasters will be made up of a series of paintings created especially for this exhibition and of the artist’s earlier works. 

With its unique and, for some, provocative aesthetics, the work of Conny Maier consequently tries to have it both ways: bold and bizarre pictorial designs go beyond the ordinary and expected, irritating and captivating impartial viewers, generating fascination and repulsion, provoking fundamental questions about our human existence as well as its continued survival in the face of the twenty-first century’s impending catastrophes, without offering any answers.  

Misshapen figures, seen with wide open mouths and gelatinous appendages, often multi-breasted and donned in malformed headdresses, wander through her canvases in vivid, sweeping brushstrokes. Her compositions oscillate between fascination and repulsion, beauty and the grotesque, to depict life beyond the expected. Considered together, Maier’s abstractions offer an unflinching look at the end of the Holocene and the realities of our new age and ask what kind of a new day might dawn.

Although Maier’s imagined scenarios repeatedly address modern humanity’s primal fears of extinction and loss of identity, of physical and mental deformation, it would be wrong to associate the artist with dystopian, apocalyptic, and thus humorless modes of thought. At many points in her work, she retains a mature sense of dark humor through tragicomic and at times absurd scenarios. 

Being thrown into the seemingly chaotic coexistence of narratives, topoi, and motifs that contest and cross-pollinate each other, while their movements never seem to come to a standstill, is what makes the aesthetic experience of viewing Maier’s work singular. Its special quality lies in the sense of possibility inherent to the work: the way we can experience beauty in the absence of any ideal harmonic order.

By deliberately affording the greatest possible freedom to continue spinning the stories depicted in her works and develop manifold interpretations, Conny Maier opens up the possibility of productively combining the sensual enjoyment of art with utopian thinking. While the at times agonizing experience of inescapable ambivalence may always harbor a foreboding of catastrophe, the sites for fantasy and experimental reasoning that Maier creates in her artistic work shed light on the question of what has not yet come to be. In this respect, traces of the not yet abandoned hope for a positive outcome from the supposed catastrophe manifest themselves in the broken, enigmatic beauty of her works. In this sense, they are beautiful disasters, or to put it differently: an insolent beauty! 

Text includes excerpts from Outrageous Beauty by Udo Kittelmann. Distanz Verlag, published to accompany the exhibition.

“Conny Maier’s paintings address the urgencies of our time and put the body and its vulnerabilities upfront in ever changing aspects. Through her depictions, she establishes a dialogue with the architecture of the Langen Foundation designed by Tadao Ando, never looking to take control but to initiate a conversation that engages with curiosity and courage—a role model the foundation has stood for since its creation.” —Karla Zerressen, Director of the Langen Foundation.

Press contacts
Send/Receive, Berlin
Anne Maier, +49 170 290 7585 / anne@sendreceive.eu

Langen Foundation, Neuss
Mara Sporn,  +49 151 62606761 / sporn@langenfoundation.de