David Hassbach
HIGH
“A hundred thousand odours seemed worthless in the presence of this scent. This one was the higher principle that all others had to aspire to. It was pure beauty.”
Patrick Suskind, The Perfume*
When is a painting complete? When has it found its optimum, its strength, brilliance, its highest appeal? When can one let go of it? When does it take off of its very own accord?
Irma Sitter’s paintings first take shape in her mind. Inspired by landscapes, memories, smells, thoughts she composes an image that comes to see the light of day as a sketch on canvas.
Instead of dogmatically advancing the painting process, she lets herself be guided by colours.
Working on the floor, with a rich colour palette, a lot of water, and with the paintbrush serving as a guide and a baton, she allows the painting to grow organically. Layers over layers of colour, applied with a glazed finish, are overlapping, blurring, intertwining, revealing a process, the painting's progress, at a single glance.
Each piece of art has its own character, its own rules; every single one is in search of its own path. In cases where the composition becomes too dense or too vague, Sitter uses white to achieve clarity; she accentuates, clearing the image by means of addition, and by relegating the chaos to the background.
What remains is what is important to see – the essence of a moment, preserved for eternity, an arrangement levitated in a timeless balance.
Walking through the exhibition and letting oneself be captivated by the colourful works, one would not suspect that none of the images are more than two years old, seeing as they diametrically counteract the general feeling of the pandemic. In a time marked by retreat and limitedness in daily life, the images seem like luminous counterpoints, an escape into colour, auratic windows into a world of vastness and weightlessness.
Nothing is imposed on the viewer. It is possible to let go and let one’s thoughts float from one association to the next, just like the bubbles in the pictures.
There is a tangible feeling that the images are not about capturing the artist’s feelings and stories. Rather, by letting the motifs take their course, Irma Sitter creates hermetic, coherent systems, compositions full of inherent references, free of the need to be unambiguous. What you see in them is what you get out of them.
It is this interactive freedom between image and viewer, it is the multitude of possibilities that allow the viewer to float a little. High. And therein lies the power of this body of work. Because in the end, nothing is harder than making something seem easy.
*Patrick Süskind, Das Parfum, Zürich: Diogenes, 1994, Kapitel 8, S. 55.
Christine Scheucher
THE STATE OF AGGREGATION´S FLEETINGNESS
Her abstract colour fields are reminiscent of organic forms: Bubbles or cloud-like formations with a floating weightlessness about them seem to loom on a background of carefully applied layers of paint. In her abstractions, Irma Sitter is never in search of the interface between image and reflection. The artist does not paint what she sees, she rather immerses herself in colour spaces that map inner landscapes and moods. Sitter's large-format technical studies come to life without the need for preliminary sketches or templates - on the canvas, which is more often than not worked on when placed in a horizontal position.
The boundaries set by said canvas turn into the boundaries of a world in which paint and brush are both agents and initiators. While earlier generations of painters have always aimed for paintings to break the mould, limitation is the condition sine qua non for Sitter’s immersive colour spaces, which represent the tradition of decelerated and contemplative abstract painting. Anyone delving into Irma Sitter's abstract landscapes of colour will keep discovering new layers revealing glimpses of the layers of colour underneath. Her images’ special luminosity is owed to a sophisticated glazing technique that is sometimes referred to as the supreme discipline of painting.
The oil paint is heavily diluted with water and applied layer by layer. The visible colour emerges as an additive mixture of transparent layers of colour. It is a technique that demands a lot of patience from the artist: Each layer of paint has to dry before a new one can be applied, which is why in her studio Sitter is always working on several pictures concurrently. According to the artist, the brush knows more than she does, taking control of an artistic process whose outcome is partly uncertain.
The brush as an agent
The transparent nature of Irma Sitter's images exhibits a relatedness to watercolour painting. Fluidity is reflected not only in the particular technique perfected by the artist but also in the non-geometric shapes coming to life on the canvas, creating the impression that the artist wanted to capture a fleeting state of aggregation that keeps eluding fixation. Everything flows.
Transformation becomes the formal principle of an artistic inquiry that focuses on the magic of colour. It is no coincidence that cloud-like elements repeatedly appear in Sitter's abstractions. The artist inscribes herself in the long tradition of "Cloud Paintings".
Great masters such as William Turner, Claude Monet or Gerhard Richter meticulously devoted themselves to the study of clouds, these fleeting formations of water, air and light that can never be fully grasped and, thanks to their diverse shapes and colours, have become an appealing theme in painting. While the depiction of clouds in classical painting is often symbolically charged - gathering storm clouds appear as a portent of approaching disaster - in her painterly practice, Irma Sitter completely frees herself from categories such as narration and symbolism. Form does not point beyond itself; it means nothing, it is only there to be viewed, or much rather, to be explored.
Female Empowerment
In the mid-1990s, Irma Sitter studied painting under Markus Prachensky, one of the main representatives of Art Informel in Austria, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Sitter's transparent, light colour palette almost seems like an antipode to the powerful, one might almost say brute, explosions of colour that Prachensky captured on canvas. Large expressive gestures are alien to Irma Sitter's painting. She creates an art of soft nuances that does not aim for a quick effect, but demands closer examination. In fact, while the artist feels that her years at the academy were formative, they were not very productive. In the 1990s, the spirit of the great painters still lingered in the hallowed halls of art academies that taught a male-dominated canon. To the dismay of many art critics, even the German painter Georg Baselitz, born in 1938, claimed that women were not able to paint. In the meantime, the rediscovery of overlooked female positions, which had to wait for recognition far too long, has long since led to a correction in art historiography.
In fact, in contemporary art, there are a striking number of women between the ages of 30 and 50 who set the tone alongside male painters such as Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. Artists such as Alicja Kwade, Helen Martin and Camille Henrot are celebrated as up-and-coming stars of the art scene, and have outstripped many of their peers. Most recently, this trend towards female art was discernible at the 59th Venice Art Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani. In 2022, around 80 per cent of works shown in the main exhibition were created by female artists. In the slipstream of this female self-empowerment, Irma Sitter has found new courage to pick up her paintbrush again. After having worked as a creative director for large companies for many years and having left painting behind, the state of emergency caused by the pandemic became Sitter’s catalyst for a new creative period that promises great things for the future.