Winner of European Fine Arts Challenge
The winner of the Salve Europa – European Fine Arts Challenge 2009 is Franziska Güttler.
You can find selected artwork and more information about Franziska Güttler here.
Statement of the Jury
Franziska Güttler holds a highly modern position in contemporary painting: Her concrete pictures are never superficial, but rather draw the viewer into imaginary worlds oscillating between Realism und Surrealism.
Güttler draws her main inspirations from fairy tales and myths and enhances them with her very own ideas and personal experience. This mixture condenses to pictures expressing a genuine desire for dreams and sensuality as a sort of alternative draft to our extremely mechanized life. However, Franziska Güttler’s paintings do not display an ideal world. Instead, their immanent atmosphere is often teetering between muted happiness and subliminal angst.
Menace though is never obvious but lurking in dark colour patches and thereby threatening the protagonist from the outside. The virtuously painted pictures thus instantly unfold an emotional impact. They do not only fascinate, but unsettle the viewer and encourage him to relate himself to their pictorial world.
Today, figurative painting is outshined by abstract imagery or else appears to be overloaded with alleged philosophical dimensions and thematic overtones. By contrast, Franziska Güttler‘s paintings exhibit a natural concreteness. At the same time, with the subject being translated into vigorous and expressive colours, they generate a kind of magic that sometimes reminds the viewer of August Macke. It is the very balance between reality and melancholic dreams that invite the viewer to linger and muse about the seemingly simple things in life.
Members of the jury:
Dr. Heike Lüddemann, Dr. Thomas Krzenck