27. Stilla rörelse

ARTIST: Maria Miesenberger (2015)
TECHNIQUE: Stainless steel

Maria Miesenberger has created the work called Quiet Movement, Climbing. Her work is often nakedly metallic. The figure on Mount Kvarntorp seems to exist out of our time dimension, but is still experienced as being so close. Is the figure going up or down, from us or toward us? We cannot catch it in flight either. Who is he/she? Perhaps it is a mirror image of ourselves as we strive on? In any case the figure will not be caught, either by us or anyone else. We are left there standing, firmly anchored in a time that is ours thinking of our next step.

Maria Miesenberger was born in 1965 in Lund and is considered to be one of the big names in contemporary art. Throughout she has studied her own self, her body and the different stages and conditions of life. She finds inspiration and models for her work within her family or her nearest relatives. Miesenberger has a unique artistry in which she is always physically present in the craft itself. Her work is characterized by great intelligence and technical perfection.

Miesenberger made a name for herself in the 1990s with a series of photographs based on pictures from her family photo album. These pictures have been shown around the world. She is one of those artists who strongly and self-evidently work with what is personal and private. She has managed with the difficulty of transforming this into a joint sounding board for each one of us, for our own memories of pictures, scents, events and sounds from the borderless kingdom of childhood.

Miesenberger works with photo and sculpture. She has studied photography and painting at the College of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm, sculpture at Parson´s School of De sign in New York. Having finished her studies in 1966 she lived and worked in New York until 2003.

The metaphorical world of the artist exists on many planes: opposites like present and past, light and dark, joy and sorrow, the self and the group. Miesenberger´s art displays a strong curiosity, always accompanied by a large portion of humility.

With the self and the individual as starting points Miesenberger asks relevant and constantly up-to-date questions about what it actually means to be a human being. At the same time she illustrates the conditions for children and young adults. Because of her way of thinking and her achievement she is represented at the Bonnier Group, the Museum of Modern Art, Malmö Museum of Art, Norrköping´s Art Museum and the Henry Buhl Collection in the US. Quiet Movement/Standing Motion (Touch down/Landing) is a permanent public work in the English Park of Varberg.

Miesenberger has still another work in Kumla called Moment in Motion to be found on the roof of the Hothouse in The Kumla city park. She has been awarded such prizes as The MMF Artist of the Year by Märta Måås-Fjetterström, The Anna Nordlander prize, the Swedish Photo Book prize, and Stockholm city honorary prize.

Just like many of Miesenberger´s other sculptures Quiet Movement has a relief pattern taken from the nerves of the cornea. Children´s games and relationship to the grown-up world are connecting links in many of Miesenberger´s works and before the viewer can bat an eye Quiet Movement has probably already, quietly and softly, sneaked away to the next game.