European Park

The catalog „European Park“ is published on the occasion of Louise Bristow’s exhibition of the same name at Berlin's Laura Mars Gallery.

Excerpt from a text by Thomas Groetz about the exhibition:

Louise Bristow composes horizontal oil paintings based on self-made models as well as different pictorial sources. In trompe-l'œil-like table or stage settings, heterogeneous pictorial 'personae' come together: photographs and reproductions that function as stage sets in the background, as it were, patterned prints, and architectural models and imaginatively designed stereometric bodies. Scenic details of children's playgrounds can often be recognized; the evocation of the sphere of carefree play is frequently juxtaposed with the motif of the working world of adults. In addition, there are cultural artifacts that have come down to us, ranging from prehistoric hand-axes to folkloristic-looking objects to postwar design, Soviet monumental sculpture, and modernist architecture.

Soberly depicted heirlooms of bygone eras can also be seen in the 2020 painting “European Park” - a title used by Bristow to designate her entire presentation. Along with three painted landscape photographs serving as a backdrop, the picture features various objects. In addition to two abstract sculptures - a reproduction of a Kandinsky painting formed into a box and a complex creation by the artist herself - one can recognize the public convenience located on Vienna's Parkring, from 1880. Three children on a playground contraption are contrasted with the depiction of a school scene. The arrangement of heterogeneous pictorial subjects is claimed to be a park, a living environment that is man-made as well.

In her visual worlds, Louise Bristow utilizes miniaturization in order to sharpen, by this quasi-inverted overwhelming gesture, the view of what constitutes contemporary society and culture at their core. Bristow's paintings of stage sets examine the state of today's seemingly pluralistic culture. The compilation of artifacts 'neutralized' in their disparate composition shows features of nostalgia and at the same time of alienation, because the different 'actors' appear on the same stage but are not sure if they do perform in the same play.