Award winning Contemporary art gallery in Cranbrook, Kent

"Happy Smile" is part of Christina Gschwantner recent "HAPPY" series which mark a subtle shift in tone in her work , without abandoning the rigor that has defined her work for years.  The "HAPPY" series began with leftover paint, casual gestures and experiments with spray paint. Only later did Gschwantner add the layers, not to correct but as a conscious response to her previous workings.  What appears light or playful at first is held in place by precise decisions and a calm sense of control. The paintings move between abstraction and figuration, between deliberate placement and events that resist control. A limited set of elements, arcs, dots, fields of white, stains of color, is repeatedly tested until the composition settles into a dynamic balance. The tension between structure and spontaneity remains visible, as does the pleasure of working through paint without forcing meaning onto it.  The choice of raw canvas and mixed media keeps the paintings physically vulnerable; drips, stains and edges remain visible, insisting that “happiness” here is built on exposed, imperfect grounds rather than polished surfaces.

Born in Vienna in 1975 and trained at the University of Applied Arts, Gschwantner has developed a practice that fuses Art Informel’s gestural freedom with the clarity and reduction of Minimal Art. International residencies in Greece, Mexico, New York and Australia have contributed to a language in which vibrant expression coexists with restraint, introspection and a measured formal structure. Across her oeuvre she has described her canvases as “relationship paintings”, in which each element must assert itself within a matrix-like order, creating an image that feels at once personal and strangely familiar to the viewer. This concern with social and emotional constellations lays the groundwork for the Happy series, where compositional decisions become a way to stage different states of balance and imbalance.