Anya Triestram (*1977), a German draughtswoman and printmaker who lives in Vienna and Leipzig, is showing current works on paper and sculptures in the cabinet of the Museum Franz Gertsch. The floral motifs and geometric-ornamental surfaces of her pastel and colored pencil drawings and resin-covered linocuts meet isopods and canopic jellies in the room.
In the cabinet of the Museum Franz Gertsch, the German draughtswoman and printmaker Anya Triestram is showing current works on paper and sculptures. Various works come together here to form a journey through forms and fragments.
The large-format, finely worked pastels and delicate colored pencil drawings hanging on the walls show plants and ornaments that the artist has composed into a pictorial whole. They move between abstraction, geometry and figuration. Her resin-coated linocuts consist of small forms that are constantly varied and reassembled in new and different ways. Triestram's picture titles, whole sentences or names, evoke complex associations.
In the middle of the room is a mystical roundel with five figures reminiscent of old canopic jars. The sculpted and partially gilded animal heads on wooden pedestals seem to whisper stories, stories of transitions, of farewells and reunions, of transformations. This carousel of time could start turning at any moment. Arranged around the traffic circle on the floor are casts of woodlice, small creatures that live in the shadows and yet enrich our living space. Their tiny bodies, captured enlarged in plaster, look like artifacts, like modern fossils that indicate the cycle of nature and transience.
Everything in the exhibition seems to seek a balance, a balance in the interplay of nature and culture, of past and future. The show becomes a place that invites us to perceive the quiet connections in things - and to see yesterday with new eyes tomorrow.
Anya Triestram was born in 1977 in the Thuringian district of Eichsfeld (DE), where she also grew up. After studying art and German as a teacher at the University of Erfurt, she studied graphic design at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig from 2002 to 2007. From 2008 to 2011, she completed her training as a master student of Annette Schröter in the painting class. Since 2015, Triestram has held the position of Senior Artist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (AT) with the artistic and technical direction for woodcut and linocut. Since the late 1990s, she has exhibited mainly in Germany and Austria and lives and works in Vienna and Leipzig. The exhibition at the Museum Franz Gertsch is Triestram's first solo exhibition in Switzerland.
The exhibition was curated by Anna Wesle in collaboration with the artist. The exhibition catalog is published by Modo Press in Frankfurt am Main.
