Momentum decides. Not the idea, not the plan, not the safety net. Every line, every color, every surface emerges from an immediate act—precisely in the moment it becomes necessary. No hesitation, no turning back. The painting is not a concept, but an event. It does not arise from control, but from the willingness to relinquish control—in favor of a radical presence in the act of making. Brigitte Oberlik-Burtscher works in a state of heightened awareness. Her painting is not spontaneous in the sense of being arbitrary, but spontaneous in the sense of being precise. Every decision is irreversible, and for that very reason, carries weight. The work does not develop along a predefined idea, but along a trace of actions that condition, shift, and intensify one another. It is a process without a safety net.
This attitude stands in the tradition of a form of painting that, since the 20th century, no longer represents but acts—from Action Painting to process-based abstraction. Yet Oberlik-Burtscher goes a step further: she dispenses with any kind of gestural attitude, any calculated expressivity. Her works are not “made wild”—they are wild because they come into being. That is a crucial difference. The paintings are extraordinary because they elude expectation. They follow no classical compositional logic and yet generate a compelling internal order. They are wild because they emerge from movement, risk, and reaction—because they smooth nothing, retract nothing, correct nothing after the fact. And they are compatible precisely for that reason: this painting does not require a neutral white cube to assert itself. It carries its own architectural force within. It can hold its ground in a bourgeois living room just as much as in a museum space—not despite, but because of its consistency. Lines arise from impulses, surfaces grow, overlap, collide, and reconnect. Colors stand beside one another, against one another, with one another. Every intervention remains visible; every decision is anchored in the image. There is no going back, no reworking in the classical sense—only a continuous moving forward. The painting stores each of its phases and makes them simultaneously present. Past and present coexist on the surface. It is precisely from this openness that a particular kind of precision emerges—not the precision of control, but of coherence. The works do not arrive at their point through reduction, but through saturation. They do not stop because they are finished, but because nothing more is missing.
The title super.b spontaneous condenses this attitude. “Spontaneous” points to the immediacy of decision, while “super” signals an intensified mode of perception—an intensity directed not outward, but inward. The “B” stands for Brigitte Oberlik-Burtscher, but also for a kind of painting that deliberately avoids detours. Direct. Unfiltered. Present. This exhibition is not a presentation of results, but of states. It reveals a form of painting that takes shape in the act and finds its clarity in risk. A painting that does not explain, but acts. And perhaps this is precisely where its true provocation lies: in showing how much freedom is possible—and how precise that freedom can be.
