Interview: Brigitte Oberlik-Burtscher
Luca Curci talks with Brigitte Oberlik-Burtscher, the winner of ARTIST OF THE MONTH – JANUARY 2023.

Brigitte Oberlik-Burtscher is an artist born in Austria, as she explained she started drawing and painting really young obtaining exhibitions and prizes already during school time. Art has always been her way of communication, She spokes with colours and pencils and she expresses emotions. Brigitte Oberlik–Burtscher admired various painters, all of whom fascinated her equally. A note from those early years still tells her today that she never wanted to decide between reduction and colourfulness, closeness or distance, naturalistic or abstract ‐ she wanted to explore everything. Contradictions and opposites still excite her ‐ beauty and destruction, easiness and density, light and shadow, seriousness and play. Combined with the choice of materials this makes her painting diverse ‐She uses watercolour, acrylic, oil, and pigments, I make monotypes, sometimes mixing materials and experimenting with them, she also has a great affinity for all kinds of paper.

Brigitte Oberlik-Burtscher has also worked on architectural and interior design projects but in 2019 she choose to focus only on painting: abstract images, but also paintings in which colours, shapes and silhouettes emerge from the depths of her memories and condense into fictional places or impressions of nature, where nature is not just abstracted landscape, but rather its character, the silence, the vastness the light, a horizon. Hues, contrasts, textures or lines, or the emotions that arise are the common denominators of her artworks, build by experimenting with individual freedom led by painting; The emotional perception and not the visual that moves her to paint, to make it visible and tangible, this challenge is always new.

Luca Curci – What is art for you?
Brigitte Oberlik – Burtsher – Art is the voice and echoes for me, it is part of my everyday life, my thinking, my feeling, and my communication. Art is a natural part of my personality, without art, I would not be the same person.

LC – What are you currently working on?
BoB – I am working on making the kind of painting that I do on paper and also on canvas ‐ this lightness, nonchalance, freedom in working, taking risks in colours, in shapes and in the way of working, especially concerning the reduction. I work on it spontaneously and in small series, which are often oriented to the series of watercolours such as the “love letters”, “reflections”, “horizons” or “voices” and much more.

LC – Among the several techniques you use, which one do you prefer to practice and which of them are
most compelling for you?
BoB – I feel most confident in watercolour painting, but I prefer to work with acrylics, combined with
drawing elements with charcoal. For me, I could say I am very often most convinced by these images,
regardless of the technique, which I question at the first moment and which I put into the corner.

LC – What are the 3# essentials to define your poetics that you could not give up?
BoB – emotional, expressive, direct

LC – What is the most challenging part about creating your artworks?
BoB – Stopping in the process of painting. Not trying to make a painting perfect, to leave it in its
spontaneous language, narrative, expression, and questions ‐ knowing that it could be more perfect, but
thus less personal, less direct, less free. Most of the time I am glad when any circumstances force or
move me to stop.