MARIA THURN UND TAXIS

The paintings of Maria Thurn und Taxis […] suggest aspects that are both comic and provocative, creative contents that evoke the pictorial aesthetic of the grotesque and the light-heartedly droll. In fact clearly associative concepts of drollery […] play with contemporaneous ideas as diverse as the cartoon image and the fairy tale.
The chosen use of comical clown-like or grotesque faces and animals has a long history in popular culture, deriving as it does from Menippean satire, through the Carnivalesque, Commedia dell’arte, to the Gothic, and in the last century through to today Hollywood horror flics and the garrulous use of the comic strip. (Mark Gisbourne, 2014)
In the artist’s own words Maria’s work deals with exploring “a tensions that is inherent in the human condition. These relate to questions of life and death, pain and happiness. Such questions often offer no clear answers. My response within my painting is an emotional one. It is deeper than reason and prior to any intellectual analysis.”