2009, Kerber, First edition

Miriam Vlaming's large-scale paintings are difficult to place, and not just at first glance. Even when viewed over an extended period of time, their visual reality generates surreal blank canvases. The result is a tug-of-war between abstraction and figuration, transformation and stagnation. Yet Vlaming's artistic utopias are not romantic, idyllic dream worlds. Instead, they are scenes of broken promises that question the system of remembering and exude disillusionment, abandonment and melancholy. Vlaming's method of combining image citations from well-known and distant cultural spheres, fragments from the past and present, is a common theme running through the works presented here, all of which date between 2003 and 2008.Published on the occasion of her first major solo exhibition Miriam Vlaming: You Promised Me at Kunsthalle Mannheim, September 2008- February 2009.

Miriam Vlaming is a German artist living and working in Berlin. Vlaming studied first in Düsseldorf where she was tutored by Jan Dibbets, and was in close contact with Jörg Immendorff, Marcus Lüpertz and Dieter Krieg. She then trained at the Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst under Prof. Arno Rink, a relationship which was celebrated in the exhibition “Rink & Vlaming. Malerei” at the Halle am Wasser, Neue Museumsinsel in Berlin in 2008.

Vlaming often paints in the unusual medium of egg tempera, applying numerous layers of thin coats of paint to the canvas, only to then remove these with sponges, brushes, or her bare hands. This method is entirely suited to her ethereal, sparsely populated landscapes. Her painting has loose roots in the tradition of German Romantic painting, whilst remaining entirely unusual.

Courtesy of Archeus