Elisabeth Mehrl: Dem Schönen

For many years Elisabeth Mehrl (*1955) has been negotiating the longing for beauty, sensuality, and opulence in her conceptual painting. She uses exaggeratedly large pieces of jewelry as visual motifs, alluringly lovely and created in a highly elaborate process of painting. In her paintings, Mehrl consistently depicts the moment of auratic charge, as she strips her pictorial objects of any kind of specific context and presents them without any sort of narrative accessories. Mehrl's paintings are multi-layered and reflective-they tend toward autonomy, leading to the open-endedness of potential meaning. The suggestive quality of this painting, which is difficult to evade, evokes a broad spectrum of emotions and philosophical questions that predominate over any supposed unambiguity. This richly illustrated monograph provides a comprehensive view of some of Mehrl's most important work cycles of recent years.