Anna Borowy’s motifs are primarily human characters and moments, depicted portrait-style and manifesting particular events. The reduced appliance of outlines and forms connects the figures with the backgrounds and accompanied diaphane images of animals. The apparent youth and grace of the portrayed are distorted by flawed structures and sinister traits.
Technically remarkable is the soft, silhouette-like application of color. Though appearing like water colors, the applied paint is oil-based with a special consistency allowing the blending with water. The base white coat of the painting is not being colored completely by the artist but serves as a continuous bright background on which the paint is thoroughly arranged. Thus the figures of the paintings appear partly overexposed, corresponding to the overlapping of several transparent image elements. Since the resulting point of view, i.e. transparency normally can only be achieved by alternating perspectives, the effect in Anna Borowy’s paintings is one of particular dynamic. This way her works fulfill not only a spacial but also a temporal perspective.
Through the limited use of paint the white background is being conserved as a structure or matrix for content, causing lightness on the one hand expressing emptiness on the other. Emphasis on the later skillfully highlights and complements the manifested motifs and forms.
Repeatedly Anna Borowy joins animals with the human protagonists in her paintings. The expression of this fauna ranges from symbolic meaning to common gestures, but either way the affinity to humans is very imminent and perceivable. Humans and animals are not shown as counterparts, but as reciprocal allegories and impressions without their identities being merged Ovidian-style.
It is not easy nowadays to phrase legitimately a primarily positive aesthetic attraction. But Anna Borowy’s works succeed in generating genuine beauty and are capable of deriving from this constituent any other inanimate facet.
Tanja Selzer draws her motifs from the daily media-related flood of images as components of human sceneries, figures in wild natural scenes or single persons and animals in front of or inside a natural background. She changes these images by composition, shift of colour and an ease of paint application, so they appear in the guise of a pretended, mostly idyllic scene.
In the works of the series Gib mir dein Rot (Give me your red) Selzer additionally emphasizes the dynamics of her nature-bound protagonists and scenes to the point of fight-like confrontations and compositions. The idyllic backgrounds remain perceptible as bearings for the image as a whole but are not only contrasted by the drastic actions in the foreground but also are stirred up and involved in it. The alternating depiction of humans and animals also their interactions are an expression of their mirror-symmetric anima. Selzer stages this without psychological abstractions but with the genuine intensity of a direct line to the source of fables.
