No. 13 / October 2019
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic & curator of the exhibition – article published in Observator Cultural, no.732/ 25th of July 2014
On 17th of July, 2014, the Pygmalion Gallery in Timişoara hosted the opening of the drawing and painting exhibition “After the Hills”, signed by Elisabeth Ochsenfeld, an artist of Romanian origin established in the 1980s in Germany. I have been interested in the artist’s creation since the late 1970s, when I became acquainted with her artistic work through the cover of the double album Cantafabule, of the Romanian / German progressive-rock band Phoenix.
In recent years, Elisabeth Ochsenfeld is constantly returning to her country, where she organizes an international symposium of visual arts and literature in Gărâna, this year the fifth edition. At the end of each cultural event, exhibitions of the participants are opened and booklets of the symposium are realeased. In 2014, in parallel with the collective exhibition at the Triade Gallery, entitled, after the theme of the symposium, “My Home Was My Castle”, Elisabeth organized a new solo show, the one mentioned here, the next step after “Mnemosyning”, in 2011, from Timisoara Museum of Art and “Human Archeology”, in 2009, from the Helios Gallery.

In her original title of the exhibition, instead of using the word “hills”, Elisabeth appealed to the archaic word “obcini”, a regionalism taken from Slovak, means ridge, an extended ridge of a hill or mountain that unites two peaks. The artist chose this title instead of a name with global-universal resonance because she drew and painted the hills that border the mountain plateau of Semenic, more precisely the horizon of Gărâna village. The region was colonized in the 19th century by a German-speaking Bohemian population brought by the Austro-Hungarian authorities from Slovakia for deforestation (by offering some privileges). The term is still used in the region.

The hills proposed by Elisabeth Ochsenfeld are both abstract, gestural and decorative. The strong point of the project is that each of the three hypostases listed is an artistic result of the other two. The play of lines, the chromatic underlinings, the rhythm and the fluidity, all these passed through the filter of Minimalism, constitute composition laws for a corpus of metaphysical works from a figurative and paradoxically aggressive perspective in a logic of their conceptual discretion.
The images of the exhibition are deliberately made in two dimensions, without illusionist tricks and without cryptic intentions. We are dealing with hills and so on, somehow represented in section, for exclusively pictorial reasons, in no case geological. No figurative element disturbs the compositions, which live by color, lines and hatches. The viewer sees hills because he was told by the title that he was dealing with hills; otherwise it is in front of abstract artworks.

What really matters are the organization of the compositions, the chromatic system and the coherence of the representations. They pass the self-test of series. The exhibition consists of three triptychs made in acrylic on canvas and forty-five drawings, all of the same coordinates. The low symmetry allows the plunging perspective on them, putting the viewer in the privileged point of observation.
The artist’s appetite for drawing is obvious, whose searches are related to the meta prefix. Interested in the spiral space, in the relationship between geography, geometry and the type of consciousness, Elisabeth Lili Ochsenfeld does not give in to narratives. The tensions in the humus’s veins are transposed into ellipses and obliques that belong exclusively to art. Signaling colors are often used in bizarre combinations. However, the organic feeling that transpires from reading the papers is extremely stable. Nothing useless in the foreground, no spectacular drawing processes, all wrapped in a magnetic atmosphere.
Although what we look at and eventually admire are only the hills, the title sends us beyond them. Behind them is the very world we live in. The exhibition offers to visitors the opportunity to simultaneously experience the feeling of being both inside and outside what they see.

