Press Release for exhibition 2021:
Galerie ART CRU Berlin is pleased to host artist Anneliese Grisard’s first-ever solo exhibition. Grisard, who is over 80 years now, has spent years of her life discreetly working in the open studio of Karl Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik (KBon) – a selection of that work is being showcased in the exhibition.
Working for years developing her own unique style of painting, Grisard found her voice by practising all throughout the early 2000’s using famous models from art history. Grisard intensively studied artists like Klimt, Matisse, Modigliani and Co., and it seeped into her own technique. She precisely combines brightly coloured and contrasting colour surfaces in her compositions. Her world of motifs, which in addition to the aforementioned models also includes autonomous work, consists primarily of a wide range of different female figures in addition to a selection of still lives and depiction of nature: art historical motifs from Art Nouveau or classical modernism, such as well-decorated women with hats and fans, headscarves or colourful dresses, a series of strangely enraptured dolls, which she places in front of monochrome backgrounds and which elegance is reminiscent of fashion drawings, to Christian motifs, such as an expressive depiction of the Virgin Mary, based on a peasant painting.
Grisard, along with her sister, fled a children’s home in East Prussia to Thuringia. She was later brought to Berlin by her father, where they resided in Steglitz. Grisard proceeded on to studying sports and painting at the Pädagogische Hochschule, she then attended the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, pedagogical department, was then treated at the KBon and could not complete her studies. She was one of the first artists, in 1998, to join the open studio, which had just been founded by Alexandra von Gersdorff-Bultmann and is now run by Claudia Helfer. Grisard’s work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions.