Gabriele Baumgartner

2023

The changing annual picture of her surroundings in southern Burgenland, the moods of the light on the landscape in Grado, Italy, or the Salzburg mountains around Altenmarkt am Zauchensee are captured as impressions directly on the canvas or paper. Sometimes she focuses on a view or a detail, at other times she tells of the sensory impressions surrounding her in a broad section. Capturing the light and the weather-related influences on the landscapes have always been an essential part of her painterly work. Her works are intended to portray how she sees and feels in this snapshot.

In Brigitte Mikl Bruckner's studios, she creates still lifes of her clothes hung on hooks, striking views of fruit, portraits of her own shoes or those of loved ones and she shows the floral beauty of arranged flowers. Often only hinted at and sketched, they are intended to enter into an active dialog with the viewer through this imperfection. For a few years now, the artist has also been revealing something about her mood, the situation or her view of the motif in the titles she chooses for her pictures, allowing the viewer to immerse themselves a little further into her world in fragments of thought and poetry.

Still tellingly, the Austrian art historian, museum director and publicist Otto Breicha (1932-2003) wrote about the artist in 1998: "(...) If you question her persistently, she admits that she is somehow concerned with the so-called essence of things. Not only, but above all ..." This capture of the essential is the striking starting point in her oeuvre, as is the freedom she - rightly - takes to not allow herself to be pigeonholed into any genre and to portray her view to the viewer in her own way. Even if it means sometimes taking offense.

The extent to which she valued an exchange on an equal footing with mutual constructive criticism is demonstrated by her joint painting sojourns with her mother Theresa Bruckner, during which both artists, often with the same subject in mind, arrived at different results. Brigitte Mikl Bruckner and Josef Mikl (1929-2008) were also linked by a constructive artistic debate in addition to their family ties. Even though they both focused on the same motif - for example melanzani or banana blossoms - the results were completely divergent: Josef Mikl's work was very abstract and Brigitte Mikl Bruckner is and was rooted in figuration. In addition to the family bond, however, the artistic dialog for over 25 years with the so-called "right of first viewing" for paintings that had just been created was formative. The mutual support, appreciation and professional debate as a critical correlate were a fruitful collaboration for both artists and certainly a good breeding ground for their further development as painters.

Brigitte Mikl Bruckner is characterized by an unwavering search for the expression of her painterly narrative. Even if this means adding one or two brushstrokes or areas of color to works of art years later and reworking what already exists with a fresh eye. What is really essential should be depicted and her freedom in her view of the world and things should be portrayed to the viewer in its most beautiful form.