by Mia Saharla

Introduction:
Dr. Andrea Brockmann
Art historian (Schmallenberg)

The exhibition of Finnish painter Mia Saharla brings together works from her two paintings series, The Way Remembering Is and About Ida. Both series are based upon repetition.

Paintings from the two series The Way Remembering Is and About Ida:

The Way Remembering Is (2013, oil on canvas, sizes vary) is a painting series exploring the themes of remembering, forgetting and attempt to restore a memory. The series is based on repetition. Saharla is trying to restore an already vanished memory of the landscape she grew up in by repeating it over and over again. The memory, image in her mind, has turned into a generic one over the years, from personal to universal. Saharla was sitting eyes closed on the floor of her studio, remembering and painting. In the end the landscape takes almost a stage-like form, where the rest of the vague memories are played again, in the mind’s eye. The series is her attempt to paint visible the process of memory. In the end it comes back to the act of painting, the gestures, adding and removing paint as our psychology and brain does with our memories and how the act of painting communicates with the attempt to restore the image. The series continues the aspect of her paintings; interest in the border area between the inner world and the reality.

About Ida (2014, oil on canvas, sizes vary) is a series of paintings based on Gertrude Stein's Ida - A Novel. The protagonist of the novel is a woman appearing and disappearing, being approached like a cubist portrait. There is a correlation between the way Stein writes Ida and the things that Saharla finds interested in the language of painting. Ida is living the current moment all the time, over and over again. The paintings of About Ida are Saharla's interpretation of her, inspired by Stein's way of using language and repetition.

Mia Saharla (born 1983) is a Finnish painter. She graduated 2010 (BA, TAMK University of Applied Sciences, the Degree Programme of Visual Arts) and has taken part in exhibitions in Finland and abroad since 2006. During 2012 she worked in Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf supported by Finnish Cultural Foundation. The exhibition in Bad Berleburg is her 12th solo exhibition.

Further information about "Mia Saharla" can be found on the internet:
www.miasaharla.net

Location:
Sparkasse Wittgenstein, Poststraße 15

Monday, 8th of September 2014

Beginning:
19.00 Uhr

Admission is free

The exhibition runs until 31st of October 2014.