pouring the color’s thinned texture onto the unprimed canvas and letting it form a puddle, she then pushes the pigments in different directions, all the while allowing chance to play its part. Once a layer dries up, Pinzer evaluates what lacks and needs for the painting to further evolve. Her approach to the inanimate painting as an active counterpart shows an honest dedication to a profoundly social give-and-take-principle: painting as an exercise in trusting the process instead of exerting control over it.

In her recent series Mother Nature / Mother Earth, 2023, Pinzer further experimented with notions of co-creation, incorporating external influences to a new extent: on a summer road trip through Portugal, she transferred her painting process to a plein air approach in the most literal sense: instead of using industrially manufactured paint, she painted with self-made colors created from earth pigments that she collected along the way. To increase contact with nature even more, she washed her canvases in the sea and let them dry in the sun: “I wanted to capture nature and the painting to truly absorb a place,” says the artist, describing her attempt to create an unfiltered imprint of nature itself. Yet, all of Pinzer’s painterly works are imbued with a variety of materials and movements alike; they carry traces of dust and particles, are made from swooshing gestures, and even show footprints at times, where the artist has walked across her paintings in the process of making them. Furthermore, sensations, thoughts, longings and memories that constitute the artist’s inner life silently seep into the creative process, contributing to the shifting moods in her paintings. Pinzer’s poetic titles are often keys to accessing her work beyond the visual level. Titles like Metamorphosis, Spheres, or WoMan are particularly indicative of her work’s boundary-crossing and subversive character.

Pinzer’s paintings, inspired by or directly created in the outdoors, read as an ode to the environment’s generosity and balance that is often forgotten in densely populated, noise-filled, and visually obstructed urban spaces.  Her works propose to reconnect with a sense of freedom that is most intrinsic to our human nature.

Text by Tatjana Schaefer