New Day Print

Biography "As a child I had two dreams. I wanted to go to Africa and I wanted to become a painter", Manja Wöhr says. She became a painter on the second -vocational- approach. From 1987 to 1989 she trained as a foreign language correspondent for economics. Afterwards she spent ten years abroad; among other places she lived in Canada, Kenya, Turkey, San Andres, Abu Dhabi, Dominican Republic, and Sri Lanka, where she worked for a German tourism company. For her, especially the time at Kenya has left deep impressions. There she also met the Dutch painters Marion van Nieuwpoort and Poen de Wijs and she studied art under both of them, van Nieuwpoort and de Wijs, for some time. In 1998 Manja Wöhr finished her last job abroad, as a destination-manager for LTU-Touristic, to return to Germany. In Germany she first worked in the field of economy. But the urge to paint grew continuously. In 2001 she quit her job as an account-manager/consultant at Harvey Nash / Germany, in order to dedicate herself completely to painting. From 2002 till 2006, she studied at the "College of Art-Stuttgart" and works as a freelance artist, since 2007. Excerpt from a text by Prof. Dr. Albrecht Leuteritz The flat* (*flat- The quality of a smooth, even, broad surface. -TN-) and decorative acrylic paintings of Manja Wöhr remind of certain appearances of Pop Art or Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Considering the energetically curved and ornamented figurations against a bare ground, formal references to art nouveau, particularly to Gustav Klimt, are indeed thinkable, too. But he, who wants to detect epigonic tendencies here, errs profoundly. Manja Wöhr does not care at all about art history. She paints what she has to paint. Not only are her pictures highly decorative, they also mesmerize the observer through their fantastic and mysterious structures - The expression of an exuberant inventiveness, but also of the ability to work meticulously precise. Those paintings are not based on paint simply thrown on a canvas, no, they - by all readiness of the artist, to the unusual, the fantastic and for experimentation - bear witness to a distinct artistic accurateness. Those, who observe her abstract appearing paintings closely, will soon realise that they are a kind of 'picture puzzles'.