"Mirage antique" Painting

PAINTINGS

The Green Glow

The decisive moment is the first glance at a painting, the surprising encounter between viewer and work. So to speak, the moment of emptiness that comes from thoughtless seeing, the first sensual absorption of color, shape, layout, composition, in short, the totality of the material from which this particular image is evoked. This state of seeing free of any judgment lasts only a few seconds, if at all.
Margret Storck, who lives in the south of France, is closer in her painting to the optical illusions of deserts than to the Hanseatic northern light of her hometown Bremen. Although any painting devoted to light refers to Impressionism, which originated in France, Margret Storck's paintings have little to do with it. They are not open-air paintings, but rather recreations of light moods that are driven into the artificial. Everything that is permitted in the dream and the mirage seems to be used effectively in these interiors, which are covered as if by color filters. We are familiar with the superimpositions of mirror images that suddenly project the room in a sideways glance and the outside in a second layer like a camera obscura, so that we have two superimposed realities or images that create colorful alienations under strong sunlight. In her more recent works, the focus is on details, on
fabrics, bedspreads, which are almost suspended as real things and seem like abstract painting, but at the same time emphasize the material, lead them out of a loss of reference to reality. They oscillate between abstraction and reality, whatever we understand by that.
Pay attention to your first impression, it is the real key.

[Extracted from the writing by Eugen Blume by Gerard Houlahan]


Prof. Dr. Eugen Blume
Eugen Blume, Dechowshof in January 2023

Curator and art historian
Director of the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin from 2001 to 2016


PHOTOGRAPHS

(…)For a short instant time stands still. Margret Storcks photographs illustrate the importance of light.They convey her interpretation of a moments glance.Ambience, transfiguration and atmospheric elements are aspects of light that we tend to take forgranted. In a dream state, such a glance is significant, but in our daily routine, it barely plays a role.