Maria Miesenberger

Children are constantly present in Maria Miesenberger’s art. Such a starting point might easily be idealised, but not in the case of Miesenberger, who takes a critical approach to gender, norms and childhood. Just as in Miesenberger’s photographic pictures containing blacked-out and reworked images from the family photo album, in the sculpture “Half an Angel”, she has erased all personal characteristics and attributes. Something of the child in the artist’s photographs seems to have stepped out and taken three-dimensional form. Like the dancing, blurred surface of the photographs, the profile of the aluminium sculpture has been softened by patterns reminiscent of fingerprints swirling around the whole of the small child’s body. With a child’s intuitive curiosity, the little body stretches upwards and forwards, towards the world and towards new experiences – towards life!

The auction’s version of “Half an Angel” is a forerunner of the monumental version that stands in Telenor’s head office in Fornebu outside Oslo. Another example of the small-scale version is in the park of Solliden Palace on the island of Öland. Estelle af Malmborg describes the large sculpture in Oslo as follows: “... Half an Angel (2002), a 7.6 metre-high aluminium girl languidly stretching, unaware of the world around her, with one arm behind her head like an angel’s wing. As in many of her aluminium pieces, Maria Miesenberger has worked on the surface, creating an organic pattern of whorls. This soft effect attracts the eye, breaking away from a tougher genre of sculpture weighed down by tradition.”

Miesenberger’s imagery exists on many different levels. It spans opposites such as present and past, dark and light, the individual and the collective, joy and sorrow. The artist is not interested in telling her own story. Instead, she throws the question back on the viewer, asking what is your history, what is your story, your experience? Her art is imbued with a strong vein of curiosity paired with a large portion of humility. Taking the self and the individual as her starting point, she is able to pose highly and constantly relevant questions about what it actually means to be human.