Ješa Denegri

White Paintings

In an attempt to explain the origin and meaning of a new cycle of Mira Brtka’s white paintings-reliefs, we must go back to a time several decades ago, into mid-1960s, the time when her first, also white, abstract paintings were made in an artistic climate defined through the concept of “post-informalism“ (after the name of the key exhibition of this period, Oltre l’informale, [or Beyond Informalism] held in San Marino in 1963). Brtka lived and workd in Rome at the time, where she had her first solo exhibitions in 1964. She took part in several group exhibitions, of which the most imporant was Forme presenti in 1965. Brtka was also a member of an inernational artistic group Illumination which was founded in 1967, led by a Japanese artists, Nobuya Abe. A common denominator of this group of male and female artists from several European and non-European countries was a special kind of abstract painting that had spiritual and meditative qualities. Brtka’s pieces at the time revealed a gradual separation from the heritage of informalism, which is reflected in her abandoning early thick layers of paint, instead of which she used flat and smooth layers of white on the surface developed mainly in horizontal linear elements that were arranged in a strict structural composition. We should remember that in the international art scene of that time, monochromatic painting was preseted at the Monochrome Malerei exhibition in Leverkusen in 1960. The theme of pure white and „white on white“ was developed at the Weis exhibition in Hannover in 1962, Weis Weis in Düsseldorf in 1965, Bianco Bianco in Rome and Weis auf Weis in Bern in 1966. Brtka did not participate in these exhibitions but the fact remains that during those years and in the period that followed she painted white paintings, which is a testimony of a concurrence of her sensibility and a very selective and current group of ideas of her time.

Several decades later, besides and after a plethora of different artistic experiences, Brtka recently went back to white paintings-reliefs, quite different from those she painted in the 1960s, but still similar enough to enable us to observe all of these pieces in continuity. White is again a common quality, but each of these paintings possesses a different and singular linear development of a two-dimensional surface. Sometimes these are absolutely exact symmetric structures, sometimes these are looser yet still regular and clear compositional wholes. In daylight or artificial light, relief elements of cast slight shadows on the surface and when the audience observe these pieces, they can spot subltle changes of visual situations. White is a constant in all of those pieces and yet white is not idential in all of them. Namely, every painting seen separately seems identically white but several of them seen together bring out surprising nuances of different variants of white. This is, therefore, the art of utter sophisticated ponderation through form, light and tone, the art that counts on the symbolism and metaphors of which which have been confirmed in the long artistic history of the era of modernism, but also the art that counts on the pure visual and esthetic that the color white possesses and achieves in the process of immediate observation and perception.

Just like in the 1960s, when the work of Mira Brtka was included in the historical context of the „post-informalist“ art, her work seeks and finds its place in the contemporary art context, which has seen significant changes at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. In today’s immense, unpredictable and uncertain art situation, here is one artist and one oeuvre sure of their own faith in the necessity of balance of the rational and the emotional, the ideational and the sensitive. This is an art that, as a final consequence, has faith in the necessity of the constructive ideal despite all the destructive elements that surround such art in the world today.