Bianca Regl / Silvie Aigner [Catalogue text for the exhibition at Hangar-7, 2021]

Bianca Regl has been living in Beijing since 2010 – and since the last years also more frequently in Vienna.

This is also where the works for the exhibition in Hangar-7 were made. These are impressive and show the artists passion for the medium of painting. Bianca Regl feels at home in the large formats – something which can be seen impressively in the current oils on canvas.

Following a series of portraits, still life is now the dominant motif. But in the choice of subject, it is not the narrative of figurative content of the representation that is in focus; rather, the colour determines the motifs – painting dominates. Exploring the colour palette, working out the tonal values of a painting form the basis of Bianca Regl’s artistic work.

The paintings then emerge in a dynamic, procedural, rapid painting process determined by the wet-on-wet technique used by Regl. This allows the colors to merge on the canvas, to diffuse into each other and into the paintings’ background, which in the current series consists of an earthy, rich blue-green. The motifs float freely in the space of the canvas. Everything is in the foreground simultaneously, there is no spatial hierarchy in the picture. Coloured surface and linear brush strokes seem to be intertwined in the interaction between figurative and abstract. Bianca Regl finds the inspiration for her motifs in her immediate surroundings as well as in the art of the old masters. According to the artist, the genre of the still life has has always had complex contents, but it has also brought forth many innovations and developments in painting technique. Regl impressively succeeds in redefining the genre dynamically in the present.

Through her palette, which she always prepares before painting, her paintings achieve a perfect harmony of the colour tones. The colour always leads away from the description of the object and becomes pure painting colour. The brush stroke becomes increasingly open and soft, even if her characteristic linear, sketch-like style is still present in the new works and fragmentarily describes individual motifs.

Bianca Regl is a painter who likes to experiment, and her work methods constantly change. She sees painting as a medium free of messages about day-to-day politics or commentaries on current themes. The strength of painting, according to Regl, lies in the power of the colours and the property of being open to a variety of perspectives and interpretations.