Maria Brunner
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Biography
Maria Brunner (born 1962 in Lienz, Austria; lives and works in Berlin) is a contemporary artist best known for her hyperrealistic paintings. In her works, she stages found and digitally modified cut-outs, everyday objects, and draperies into enigmatic arrangements that she first photographs and then translates into painting. Through dramatic light-and-shadow contrasts, special pigments, and a precise, almost photographic technique, Brunner creates an atmosphere that oscillates between intimacy, theatricality, and abstraction. Her works have been exhibited internationally and are regarded today as an important position in contemporary Austrian painting.
In October 2025, Maria Brunner's solo presentation KATHEDRaLe took place at La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière as part of OFFSCREEN Paris. Brunner has held institutional solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Offenburg, Kunst Forum Rottweil and Kunstverein Heilbronn, among others. She participated in group exhibitions at Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck, and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg. The artist has been represented by Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, since 1992.
Maria Brunner’s works are included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sammlung Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, and Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck.
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Works
Maria Brunner
Das Vielleichtchen, 2025Oil on canvasSigned, dated and titled verso120 x 100 cm
47.2 x 39.4 inchesB-MBRUNNER-.25-0013Maria Brunner has for decades built a painting practice that combines precision, stillness, and formal observation. She studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (1980-1985). Her works often...Maria Brunner has for decades built a painting practice that combines precision, stillness, and formal observation. She studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (1980-1985).
Her works often focus on singular motifs: objects, flowers (e.g., amaryllis), draped fabrics, floating forms, faces peering out etc. Her surfaces are rich but not maximalist; she works in oil, often at considerable scale, deploying light, shadow, subtle texture, and color to give objects a presence that’s almost uncanny. She is interested in what it means for something to appear, to be looked at, to flicker between an exactitude and something more elusive.
Her recent works in the exhibition Acqua Felice at Capitain Petzel show she continues to modulate texture, light, and scale, and to explore how an image demands viewer intimacy—either closeness or lingering observation.1of 9ExhibitionsExternal ExhibitionsOFFSCREEN, 2025
La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, Paris
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