Introduction
With her powerfully expressive painting style and bright, finely tuned colour palette, Mandy Friedrich follows in the tradition of the Dresden School of Painting, but is forging her own unique path. When Mandy Friedrich came to study painting at the Dresden Art Academy in 1999, she met Siegfried Klotz and Elke Hopfe, and in 2005, as a master student, she met Ralf Kerbach. Siegfried Klotz in particular, the ‘people seeker’ and great representative of the tradition-rich Dresden School, became her pioneering teacher. His absolute identification with painting, his sense of colour and his determination to ‘build pictures out of colour’ were internalised by Mandy Friedrich and developed independently.
Mandy Friedrich finds her subjects in the midst of life – in nature, everyday life and history, literature and music. Her portraits and landscapes are particularly impressive. Mandy Friedrich paints friends and companions, explores rural and urban spaces, always with a keen eye for the inconspicuous and seemingly insignificant. Mandy Friedrich succeeds in capturing the special in the everyday through her painting.
For Mandy Friedrich, painting is strongly connected to emotion, and her pictures often emerge in a frenzy. Her passionate relationship with music is not without influence, lending her powerful painting style a palpable pulsating sound. Pictures of furrowed fields, turbulent skies, swaying trees and spray- spattered seawater impressively demonstrate this. Mandy Friedrich experiences landscape very directly and brings it powerfully to the canvas. Come wind or weather, she sets off on foot or by bicycle, her canvas strapped to her backpack or trailer, her painting materials stowed in a wooden case. The small, contemplative winter landscapes in the exhibition do not reveal that they were sometimes created in snowstorms and under the most adverse conditions. It is the elemental experiences in nature, its beauty, its unruly, relentless and uninfluenced nature that make Mandy Friedrich's landscapes so authentic and powerful.
Mandy Friedrich's paintings do not focus primarily on what is depicted, but rather on the feelings and metaphorical images inherent in it. Landscapes become "landscapes of the soul", portraits become "mirrors of the soul". In this way, the inner life and state of mind of the subject become visible. Her portraits are characterised by a particularly emphatic empathy. They are not revealing, but above all one thing: honest. All these touching portraits, in which the lightness or heaviness of life is shown, the ageing person, the madness of the city dweller, the rapture of a musician, the individuality of a friend or the playfulness of a child, all these are "images of people" that are enchantingly beautiful because they show us something essential about these people in this captured moment.
In addition to delightful cheerfulness, Mandy Friedrich's paintings also have a melancholic undertone. Bright luminous colours are accompanied by ominous dark tones, reflecting both the light and the shadows of life. The artist embarks on a journey of discovery to explore the diversity of life, the human condition, the conditions of being human. All of Mandy Friedrich's subtle and virtuosic paintings testify to a clear humanistic attitude: confidence and happiness may always be preserved and upheld in our times of crisis.
