03/21/2019 to 03/31/2019
Domagkateliers, Halle 50, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Str. 30, 80807 Munich, Germany
Carola von Seherr-Thoss
Give it a splash
Painting. Acrylic on canvas and paper
From March 21 to March 31, 2019, Carola von Seherr-Thoss presents for the first time in Hall 50 of the Domagkateliers paintings created over the past six years. The image came after the sound: she has been working with the voice for over 30 years, today as a lecturer at the August Everding Theater Academy and as a coach for actors, speakers, presenters and executives, and earlier also as a singer. However, her interest in visual expression has shaped her since the mid-1980s, when she was still working as an actress – initially as a viewer, and since 2013 also as a painter in a studio in Beuerberg near Munich.
Carola von Seherr-Thoss describes her work as a process that takes place in several steps and quite differently from working with the voice: Bumping paint, looking at it, refining it. “When painting, I experience a creative freedom in which the familiar questions from acting practice – how, why, why, who, when, for whom – do not even arise. Here I allow myself to unconditionally follow a creative instinct.” One possible approach to painting for her is to start from a concrete subject. More and more often it is a landscape impression that she has captured in a photograph. The human being is here mostly not in the picture, but expresses itself indirectly in the individual pictorial language. The subject serves as the initial spark, which is followed by the examination of color and form.
Triggering design and leaving it to itself
Seherr-Thoss usually follows the painting impulse with broad brushes. The movement with the brush on the canvas has a form of wildness, it is usually fast and eruptive. As the brush swings around the room, drops, streaks and lines fly onto the canvas. The canvases hang on the wall or lie on the floor as this happens.
Carola von Seherr-Thoss paints the paper works, which belong to a series, not in order, but simultaneously: “Here I am interested in how the large painting gesture with the broad brush behaves on the much smaller surface, how the subject, usually painted with great intensity on the large canvases, ‘drips’ in the paper works, simplifies, becomes more transparent and clear, or also condenses. The ‘wave’ begins on the canvas paintings and rolls out on the paper works.” The colors remain “pure” in their colorfulness, they are not mixed beforehand, but blend exclusively during painting on the canvas. “To lay out areas of color, brushstrokes and blobs on the paintings, then to rub the paintings off, to move them against each other or to push them off, that means for me to nudge design and then to leave it to itself. The traces that the repeated rubbings of two pictures leave on the respective single picture, this coincidence of the coincidence of color shades, color streaks, large and small drops and two-dimensional color structures, these are essential design elements that interest me more and more.”
The dialogue in the picture
In a series, the large canvas paintings and the accompanying paper paintings form a thematic pictorial space into which the viewer can enter.
The paintings in a series are related to each other. In diptychs or triptychs, the gaps, the free spaces between the paintings, play an important role. The gaps are projection surfaces for the associations of the viewer, who has the freedom to complete and continue lines and forms in his or her own mind. “This is comparable to the silence in music, which invites the listener to think a bit further,” says Carola von Seherr-Thoss. The closeness to the music is repeated in the juxtaposition of the images. Through them, movement is created, a serial, rhythmic, cinematic flow, similar to the recurrence of a modified theme in music. Repetition, the same, the recognizable emerge and give rise to movement in space, which the viewer can follow.
Carola von Seherr-Thoss studied acting and singing in Munich and Berlin. She had engagements as an actress and singer in Hamburg, Kassel, Osnabrück, Berlin and others. She realized her own theater projects and cross-genre events with painters and musicians in TV and radio productions. For the past 25 years she has been teaching acting, speaking and singing at the Karlsruhe University of Music, the Augsburg/Nuremberg University of Music, the Munich University of Music and Theatre and the LMU Munich. Since 1997 she has been teaching at the Bavarian Theater Academy August Everding in the acting course. In 2015 she was awarded the honorary certificate of the Free State of Bavaria for 25 years of artistic teaching. In 1990, she founded the Studio Vocal-Acting, where she coaches and trains executives, actors, speakers, presenters and scriptwriters.