Magdalena Maller: Painting as Collected Experience
Artist in Focus: Magdalena Maller’s paintings bring violence, intimacy and memory into tension through layered surfaces, stitched canvases and condensed scenes.
Magdalena Maller - Artist in Focus. Artist portrait. Image courtesy the artist.
Between brutality and tenderness
Magdalena Maller – Painting .
Magdalena Maller’s painting emerges from accumulation rather than narration. Her practice is grounded in collecting: words, images, fragments of experience, moments encountered directly or absorbed indirectly. These elements do not appear as references to be decoded, but as material that is reorganized, layered, and reactivated on the surface. What results are paintings that feel dense with memory without ever becoming illustrative.
Working with egg tempera, oil, pigment, and rabbit-skin glue, often on stitched or reassembled canvases, Maller treats painting as a physical and temporal process. Surfaces are built, interrupted, covered, and reopened. Figures, animals, architectural hints, and symbolic gestures appear only partially, as if recalled rather than observed. The material logic mirrors the content: fragility and force coexist, tenderness is never far from threat, and beauty is inseparable from violence.
Rather than telling stories, Maller’s works behave like condensed scenes. They hold multiple states at once: intimacy and distance, protection and exposure, dream and premonition. The imagery feels nocturnal and alert, populated by creatures, bodies, and encounters that seem to hover between memory and myth. Titles often function as quiet signals, offering orientation without closing interpretation.
Magdalena Maller studies painting and graphic design at the University of Art and Design Linz. Her practice already demonstrates a distinct visual language that resists resolution, insisting instead on painterly tension, material presence, and emotional immediacy.
“Magdalena Maller’s work enters into a quiet, impressive dialogue with the masters of existential imagery. Violence, fear, madness and loneliness coexist with closeness, eroticism and humanity, transformed into a sketchy, fragmentary painterly language full of allusions.” - Ilse Haider, Linz, July 2025
Magdalena Maller´s paintings resonate with historical and literary echoes, from Goya’s Caprichos to testimonies of persecution, without ever collapsing into illustration.
Magdalena Maller:Ententod (Death of a Duck). Pigment on canvas. Image courtesy the artist.Magdalena Maller:Mein Bruder hätte einen Zauberkasten zu Weihnachten bekommen sollen. Er kam am 23.12 ins Krankenhaus, am 04.01 ist er gestorben. Ich habe den Koffer Ende Januar dann geschenkt bekommen. Ich war noch zu klein, um damit richtig zaubern zu können (My Brother Was Supposed to Receive a Magic Set for Christmas. He Was Taken to the Hospital on December 23. He Died on January 4. I Received the Case at the End of January. I Was Still Too Young to Really Perform Magic), 2025. Pigment, egg tempera and oil on canvas, 39 × 51 cm. Image courtesy the artist.Magdalena Maller:Wie kommt ihr nur auf den Gedanken, eure Leiden als Besiegte würden erleichtert, wenn ihr Kollaborateure seid? (How Do You Come to Think That Your Suffering as the Defeated Would Be Eased If You Collaborate?), Francisco de Goya, 2025. Pigment, oil and egg tempera on canvas. Image courtesy the artist.Magdalena Maller:Mein Vater wurde statt meiner bestraft. Sie haben ihm die Augen ausgestochen (My Father Was Punished Instead of Me. They Gouged Out His Eyes), 2025. Pigment and oil on canvas, 28 × 40 cm. Image courtesy the artist.Magdalena Maller:Ich war es nicht, die es tat (I Was Not the One Who Did It), 2025. Excerpt from The Fairy Tales by Hermann Hesse: “In that moment he appeared, having heard Fino’s barking and whining in the gateway, and stood beside Baldasare, who laughed as the half-lame dog tried fearfully to swim. At the noise, Margherita appeared on the balcony of the first floor. ‘Send the gondola over, for God’s sake,’ Filippo cried breathlessly. ‘Let him be fetched, my lady, at once, he is drowning! O Fino, oh Fino.’ But Lord Baldasare laughed and held the oarsman back with a command as he was about to untie the gondola. Once more Filippo tried to turn to his mistress and plead with her, but at that moment she left the balcony without a word.”Magdalena Maller:Das süßliche Getränk mit der Milchhaut drauf, vor der sich bekanntlich alle Kinder der Welt, außer den Hungernden, ekeln (The Sweetish Drink with the Skin of Milk on Top, Which All Children in the World, Except the Hungry, Find Disgusting), 2025. After a phrase from Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. Pigment, egg tempera and oil on canvas, 47 × 49 cm. Image courtesy the artist.Magdalena Maller:Sie verschwieg alles… (She Kept Silent About Everything…), 2025. After a passage from Katja Petrowskaja, Maybe Esther: “She kept silent about everything. Her former beauty, her erudition, she kept silent about everything. In the service of her husband, she kept silent about her illnesses and worries, her teaching methods, her increasing deafness as she walked to the kitchen and back. She kept silent about the birthdays of the dead, the birthdays of the murdered, which she had commemorated alone for decades. She kept silent about other dates as well. She remembered everything and everyone she had touched in her life. She kept silent about the war, about before and after, about all the trains and all the cities, about the grief for her father, who survived the war but did not return to the family and later lived in the house next door.” Pigment and oil on canvas, 155 × 100 cm. Image courtesy the artist.Magdalena Maller:Mut und Hoffnung, Tschüss (Courage and Hope, Goodbye), 2025. Colored pencil on canvas, 33 × 40 cm. Image courtesy the artist.Magdalena Maller:Die Edelmütigen, wenn der Rucksack kaputt ist, dann brauche ich ihm nicht mehr zu sagen, wenn er offen ist. (The Noble Ones, When the Backpack Is Broken, I No Longer Need to Tell Him When It Is Open), 2025.Pigment on canvas, 42 × 44 cm. Image courtesy the artist.
Join Catapults - Newsletter
No spam, no sharing to third party. Only you and me.
Similar topics
Bérénice Gaça Courtin: Weaving as Encrypted Memory
→
Artist in Focus: Bérénice Gaça Courtin works with textile, code and performance to connect resistance history, digital systems and embodied making
Sarah Hischemöller: Presence Without Resolution
→
Sarah Hischemöller works across painting and sculpture, staging fragile states of presence, tension and perceptual instability.
Christina Gschwantner: Painting as a Moment of Relief
→
Artist in Focus: Christina Gschwantner works with painting to hold chance, restraint, and lightness in tension, letting pleasure and structure coexist
Bart Gielen: Timeless Weight
→
Artist in Focus: Bart Gielen works between drawing and ceramics, where restraint, tension and material weight shape images that resist clear narrative and remain deliberately elusive.
