by Giovanni di Paolo) (2021), 24 x 18 cm, watercolor & oil on board
personality questionnaire (2021), 30 x 18 cm, oil on board
my crumpled half-thoughts (2022), 200 x 120 cm, watercolor & oil on canvas, photo: Rudolf Strobl
would keep me with her (2022), 200 x 120 cm, oil on canvas, photo: Rudolf Strobl
Titania Seidl (b. 1988 in Vienna, Austria) is concerned with the construction of the female self and the narrative strategies that feed into this construction. As an avid reader of all kinds of fiction Seidl is interested in both the auctorial voice (How are female characters described by male narrators? How do female authors describe their characters?) and the corruption of that voice by appropriative techniques (the re-writing happening in the translation of texts into different languages, e.g.).
She then translates these concerns into paintings, a medium that’s still emblematic for a certain image of male genius, yet also accessible to a non-specialist audience.Seidl is using images from different sources – art history, subculture, comics, self-help literature, her own sketches – and tries to unbalance the hierarchies between these different sources, using
the canvas as a unifier. The finished paintings sometimes show clear referential, „legible“ icons or fragments of stories, sometimes they appear abstract altogether. The paintings can take on the form of diminutive, intimate „peepholes“ or large, almost architectural backdrops. Artist lives and works in Vienna.