Born in 1970 in Kleinmachnow
Lives and works in Berlin and Zurich

Maviie Mauer's art is embedded in an exciting system of coordinates. Her art shows moments of an inner as well as an outer view, conveying dimensions of both subjective and objective expressiveness. In this interplay between inside and outside, between invisible and visible things, four basic artistic attitudes are united to a certain extent.

The realistic attitude includes the visible external reality in its perception. The structural attitude aims to understand and organise this external reality. The romantic attitude expresses the invisible inner reality. And the symbolist attitude wants to interpret and evaluate this inner reality (see Sandro Boccola: "Die Kunst der Moderne", 1994). A look at Maviie Mauer's artistic work shows that these attitudes can permeate each other. As a rule, however, one attitude plays the decisive role. It is decisive for the style and character of the work. But one attitude can also be abandoned in favour of another. Mauer's painting is characterised by the fact that she moves in all four of the above-mentioned fields and knows how to combine them in a sophisticated way. The Berlin-based artist succeeds in taking possession of both individual and collective reality, questioning it and giving it a new form through artistic remodelling.

A lack of boundaries of the room

It is generally accepted that human beings exist in a small space, the microcosm, and that their environment is described by the larger whole, the macrocosm. The works of Maviie Mauer show that these relationships can also be reversed: Man as representative of the macrocosm, nature as microcosm. Neither nature nor human beings have clear boundaries. Each is part of the other: Man is the sum of the world and the world is the unfolding of man.

Works such as "Fantasy Island", "Fire and Flame" or "Water and Ice" seem like micro-sequences of larger pictorial spaces that allow the cosmos of a macro-world to be experienced far beyond the painted surface. Mauer's paintings enable a dialogue-based visual experience that seduces the senses and stimulates the intellect. Paintings such as "Fire" and "Water" are so dense that, beyond their world of shapes and colours, they also have the potential to tell stories. On the one hand, we find ourselves in the south, experiencing summer, growth and heat. In the north, we are confronted with winter, stagnation and cold. Elsewhere, feelings such as anger and fear are evoked in the viewer in equal measure. Mauer's paintings generate the power of their message from the moments of tension in such constellations.

Her paintings are based on a perspective of that romantic attitude to life that is characterised by the idea of bringing everything into a relationship with everything else and wanting to see the most diverse forms and images of appearance interwoven with one another. Her works are characterised by the idea of permanent growth, becoming and proliferation, the aspect of closeness to nature and, time and again, the boundlessness of space.

Romantic Ideals

With her imagery, Maviie Mauer opens up a space for the sensitive in an expressive way. In this way, an "inner truth", as the artist puts it, finds expression.

When she abruptly states in a letter that she basically paints "nothing more than self-portraits", the surprising nature of this statement only applies for the first moment. For what her pictures show are inner worlds, inner images of a colourful and complex reality. And, as if she would like to reveal herself at one point or another, in works such as "Homeless", "Homelike" and "Face", outlined hints of faces suddenly become recognisable in the background, while the foreground appears alienated in a kind of pixelation. Yet the faces have both a universal and individual character. Because the rest of us are also recognisable in them. The artist writes: "For me, art is the opportunity to package my inner message and stretch reality at the same time."

If a semantic trace in the root word of Romanticism refers to the novel-like, then there is also a correspondence to Maviie Mauer's painting, in which the wondrous, the fantastical, the invented and the distant in time come together in a game of design. Sensations such as longing, restlessness, the boundlessness of space, loneliness, the tragedy of existence and the unattainability of the ideal are harboured in the Romanticism repository.