Out and about with Berlin Painter Maryna Baranovska.

Contemplating the trees in Maryna Baranovska´s "Nacht im Tannenwald"-series makes the beholder feel like facing a wall. Painted only in the various shades of darkness, they resemble undistinguishable parts of an organism both impenetrable and unpleasant which has no particular regard for individuality and neither admits outsiders nor offers an escape route to the lost. Just like the more unfriendly cities present themselves to those who either haven´t been around for long enough - or for way too long.

But while one can´t see the trees for the forest in the "Nacht im Tannenwald" series, the young Berlin painter´s large format single tree paintings represent a radically contradicting position: Floating

freely and literally deracinated they claim individuality and let their bark tell both story and history. No matter whether seemingly young or old, grown in twisted ways or only present as a ghostlike shadow print, for them no way leads back into the forest.

A similar feeling is echoed in the artist´s small format collages: The world of orthodox mysticism that she evokes offers no real escape from the strings attached to the modern human condition: Those images of empty churches and fading saints already know about their inherent nostalgic aura.

At first sight these aspects of Maryna Barnanovska´s oeuvre seem like contradictions, still they are rooted in how she has lived through the past and how she perceives the present. After five years of art school education she leaves her Kiev home on the advice of a forest-loving, already Berlin-based friend for Bonn - only to find herself in the new German capital around the millenium. There she gains ground quickly, heavily circulating between Berlin´s three favourite bohemian neighbourhoods of the 70s, the 90s and the coming decade: Charlottenburg, Friedrichshain and Neukoelln. Still studying at Berlins Academy for Fine Arts (UdK) with Dieter Hacker and Valerie Favre, soon the word about her mythic works, to which she has been inspired by masters old and new from Cranach to Kiefer, spreads all over town. Still, the artist has no intention whatsoever to be misunderstood as the painting forest fairy from the wild, wild East. And that is why she already is working on new plans for paintings beyond the forest: Driven by a growing interest in the aesthetic codes of urban space and a sense for absurd humour, her latest sujets are the trees´ enemies, natural and artificial: Dogs and walls.

Those trees don´t have names - they are not birch or sycamore or whatever. Tree number one, tree number two, tree number three and that´s that. I don´t care about names, I care about painting. And if indeed a tree should be recognizable it hasn´t been dissolved enough. Why tree and forest and all the rest of it? I was interested in deconstructing a classical painting from the 17th or 18th century that shows an oak, a birch and so on in a beautiful scenery. I am only interested in the extracts of that. I do leave the visible layers of painting in my works to make them more alive. Because that is what really moves me - painting as gesture. In the moment of painting the painting mirrors me.