In the course of history the issue of why art is made and what art might mean has been interpreted...well, a lot, to say the least. There are authors who wish to draw attention to social bottlenecks. There are others who wish to create „pleasant objects”. Third ones interpret history and the fourths the art of painting itself, not to mention the fifths who attempt to mix all of the above. But besides these Major Reasons there is a range of smaller, more intimate ones, reasons that start from the personal level yet are not less important. Thus the creative work of Marju Bormeister provides us with another key of looking at art.
Her paintings reflect the role of art in interpreting, aestheticizing and conveying the everyday world of an individual and its symbols. Frequent motifs of home in Bormeister’s paintings are associated with home: the familiar rooftop seen from afar, the corner of the new kitchen, watching TV in the morning. What happens here is the eternization of domestic rituals, folding of the small worlds together and apart. This may be interpreted as the artist wishing to indicate that there is something uncommon also in the common things. Fish on the table and the orange kitchen-corner reflect one possibility of seeing the world: we should not always look for the extraordinary but realize charm also in what seems ordinary. When the German artist Joseph Beuys said the famous “Every man is an artist”, another German author, Martin Kippenberger responded: “Every artist is a man.”
However, the art of painting can not be interpreted based on the subject only. Also the aspects of how the artist has actually accomplished his or her idea, are important. Here Bormeister has come up with an interesting link between limited language and bold, even unexpected and sometimes luscious use of colour. Bormeister is not very straightforward when saying things; only the roof is seen of a home and the corner of a kitchen. Her language is poetic, veiling, hinting, and sensuous. Yet all these senses and hints are very sharply perceived: each object has its own colour, vividly embedded in one’s memory. Nothing can take that away from the artist or the painting.