Coming from Leipzig, Theresa Möller brings the abundance of colors of the jungle in the AEDAEN gallery this summer. And for urban citizens whose their sole contact with nature is often the savage weeds making their ways in the concrete cracks, these paintings bring more than just beauty of forms and colors.

Theresa Möller, Garten, oil and acrylic on canvas, 190x280cm, 2019 © Courtesy of the artist

Hung on the concrete walls of the room, the tall paintings look like an opening in another dimension. For the artistic director, the artwork of Theresa Möller offers a sensation close to the meditative state we can feel after a long walk in nature : As he says, “I have the feeling that your paintings propose this kind of perspective to the viewer: pulling him toward the feeling of staring at a landscape after a long walk, enabling the consideration of slow and smooth shifts in the scenery within the frame of the canvas”.

Theresa Möller, Loses Geflecht, oil and acrylic on canvas, 190x160cm, 2019 © Julie Aubry-Tirel

Mixing abstract forms with more detailed elements of nature, as leaves and high weeds, Theresa Möller paint a lush universe where colors, perfectly mastered, set a new light on the landscape, as all the light spectrum of the sun has been captured in canvas. Her own practice seems to be driven by intuition and “laissez-faire” : if she works on structure and some layouts, the artist lets the matter “live their own life” on the canvas. Mixed with water,then acrylic can drip and that is a form of nature which takes it’s part of the artistic process. Here it is the beautiful paradox of her art : spontaneous and natural processes bring rupture with the artificial and realistic illusion of nature which thrills and enchante us at the first sight.

As a gardener of a new genre, the artist is no more just a maker of devices, occurring and mastering the natural process. Here, she rather uses the device in harmony with natural processes, giving to happenstance and chance a prime position in the creative process. That brings up this particular point : nature isn’t just the representations we have of forest, plants, and flowers, as a reality disconnected from our daily life, as lost paradise, a garden of Eden existing in another dimension, far away from us. We work since the dawn of time side-by-side with natural processes, but we have forgotten our full implication in the ecosystem, in the way they work. For better or for worse, we are a part of nature, and nature is a process which agitates us, animates us in every moment of our life, in a way we can so easily forget.

Theresa Möller, Gefüge, oil and acrylic on canvas, 220x300cm, 2019 © Courtesy of the artist

But, beyond this thought, there’s a real difficulty for a writer to talk about the work of Theresa. Indeed, her painting invites us to silence, this same silence which seizes us when we plunge ourselves in savage nature, and makes us more accurate, more attentive to the littles details around us. Then, the noise of the street outside, punctuated by the pervasive bip and electronic noises of automats which live in the wall of the building, the disembodied voices who resonate in the street, the stressed cars and their aggressive horn, all this urban cloud of exhausting noises vanishing for a moment.

By offering to our so-stimulated eyes another kind of foisonnement proliferation, Theresa Möller touches more than just our retina. She takes care of all our body, without any one word, neither other gesture than just her brush on the canvas, and it’s like the warm caress of sunshine on our skin.


Theresa Möller, Where the footpath leads,

June 21th - August 30th

AEDAEN Gallery
1A rue des Aveugles,
67000 STRASBOURG

For more work by Theresa Möller, you can visit her website here. For more information about the gallery, please follow this link.