Coming from painting, my artistic work increasingly expands into space. From composition and improvisation emerge ecosystems of subtle relationships and fragile equilibria that work with the irritation through the alienation of familiar things. Starting from found artifacts, such as pieces of glass, bent metal from demolition sites, or wooden slats, fragile poetic formations are formed through a slow process of reworkings, revealing what they once were; mere utilitarian material, manufactured to fulfill a practical use, and joining together, as it were, to become what they then are; form shapes that, in their intrinsic value and in the play of their coloration and painterly gestures, signify ever new points of reference, beginning and end.

Jessica Buhlmann

Living Shapes



Jessica Buhlmann does not look for the loud spectacle, but conducts subtle research work in her painting . How often has the end of painting been proclaimed, as if all colors and forms on the canvas had long since been tested and explored. Jessica Buhlmann does not care. She knows that the search for the perfect composition is an endless endeavor, that one can harmoniously balance the weights on the canvas and yet never reach a conclusion. Buhlmann studied painting, but she never picks up a brush. She develops initial structures on her paintings with tape, then presses the oil paint directly from the tube onto the canvas and works with a palette knife - "so that the paint has a body," as she says. When Buhlmann then tears off the strips again, hard edges emerge that rebel plastically like reliefs. The result is deliberately superficial. For the artist does not want to demonstrate how painting can virtuously open up spaces. She develops level-headed compositions that explore the interplay of elements. The number of her colors is manageable, the hues are pale. Bounded by the edges of the picture, something is pressed here, something is tenderly embraced there. Some forms seem lost, others seem to be enjoying themselves in carefree togetherness. Sometimes a stick bores itself into the blue, then again a point penetrates into a tired triangle. Forms can also be eloquent, live, suffer, love.
 In this play of abstract art, it is not about associations and the appeal of representational motifs. The more Buhlmann distances herself from real references, the more she needs her own rules "to be able to hold on," as she says. During the painting process, which is also guided by intuition, she repeatedly formulates such rules, which she then breaks, so that they can no longer be traced back in the paintings. This creates a free play of forms, full of tension and mysterious references. Painting as a careful research work, modest, concentrated and beautiful. 

Adrienne Braun