In March 1995 I presented Petra Maitz, who had participated in significant
international feminist group shows, in a solo exhibition at the studio
of the Neue Galerie Graz in my series „Young Austrian Female Artists
of the Ninties„. She showed a space installation with an embroidered
tapestry-turned-floor sculpture. In a way typical of the post-feminist
production of pictures in the eighties and nineties, Petra Maitz takes
a self-confident stance as she declares needlework such as sewing, embroidering
and crocheting (often considered inferior) her artistic medium of choice.Transcending
the visual media, she turns images based on photographs into paintings
and textiles. She picks up trivial petit bourgeois scenes or horses
as her motifs, embroidering them on tea towels.But first and foremost,she
uses her camera to document the big city as an existential image of
society.The photographs then form the basis of large-scale paintings
on paper, which in turn are nothing but patterns for her monumental
embroidered tapestries. Animal and garment objects as well as crocheted
sculptures are as much part of her repertory as are provocative paintings
and subtle feminist objects thematizing issues of gender relations and
female sexuality.
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