Bettina Graf Toucanart

Bettina Graf (b 1977 in Winterthur, lives and works in Zurich) collects supermarket pictures and transforms these small-format, mass-produced landscape paintings into large oil paintings. In her transformation of the pictures, which are scorned as kitsch, she exaggerates them even further through excessive colorfulness and through thick layering of paint. The Glarus Art Museum presents the works of the young artist, who completed her training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2002, for the first time in an institutional exhibition.
Bettina Graf does not imitate nature, but rather paints a picture of a picture pretending to be a work of art. As she says herself, ‹A painting has naturalistic or abstract qualities; only reality has real qualities. The more naturalistic a painting appears, the more precisely the pictorial implementation corresponds to the real world of things. The landscape picture manufactured in Asia is reproduced naturalistically by me only because I have bought it as a real object and it therefore can be assigned to the real world of things – the reproduction is a picture of an object, a picture of a picture. It has separated itself from real nature, but it contains my memories of actual nature.›
The serial manufacturing process (the pictures are usually produced by multiple painters in a low-wage country) and the stereotypical motifs expose Bettina Graf's source images as a commercial product. The artist also understands kitsch – a portrayal of an illusory world in which feelings are feigned, false, or second-hand – as an expression of the longings of a society. Underneath her conceptual, playful irony therefore lies the question of what a perfect picture of longing should look like. The fact that pictures of longing often deal with untouched nature or romantically noble nature scenarios raises questions. For the artistic layperson, is the ‹image in itself› always a landscape image? Is there something like an archetypal landscape composition? Can art-historical parallels perhaps even be found with compositions of landscape painting in the 19th century? And for what reason do people want to own painted pictures in the first place if they are not a priori even interested in art?