Christine Streuli’s (*1975) large-format paintings are colour manifestos that draw inspiration from a wide variety of sources, which the artist weaves together into a dense fabric. In a short space of time, the well-travelled artist has launched a highly successful career. Between 2004 and 2006, she received the Swiss Federal Art Scholarship three times in a row, and in 2007 she represented Switzerland (alongside Yves Netzhammer, Urs Fischer and Ugo Rondinone) at the Venice Biennale – one of the youngest artists ever to receive this honour.

Christine Streuli occupies a special position in the context of contemporary painting: she works with a diverse visual language that draws on a wide variety of sources, including art history, pop culture and very different cultural circles. The artist uses symmetry, reflection and repetition to develop patterns and highly ornamental pictorial structures. Often, several such ornaments are intertwined in one and the same image. The multi-layered structure of the images stems from the superimposition of such elements, but also from the deliberate combination of very different painting techniques. Christine Streuli is not a classical painter who paints her pictures in the conventional sense; rather, she references both painting itself and painterly techniques, using stencils, spray paint and the rubbing technique. Her aim is to draw increased attention to the artificiality of the image. Despite this translation and reflective detachment, her highly suggestive images have a very direct and emotional impact, not least because of their meaningful pictorial symbols and intense colours.

Christine Streuli’s most recent exhibitions have been characterised by room-filling installations in which the paintings extend far beyond the edges and boundaries of the pictures themselves, spreading across the walls, floor and ceiling. In contrast, the exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus focuses on the paintings themselves, which demand to be viewed in their complexity without being immediately absorbed into a larger whole. At the heart of the exhibition are new, surprisingly figurative paintings that form a metaphorical counterpart to the lust and sensuality of painterly confrontations and unions.

An artist’s book with black-and-white linocuts by Christine Streuli will be published to accompany the exhibition.