Maddie Aunger
Maddie Aunger is a representational painter from St. Louis, Missouri. She received her MFA in Painting from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2022 where she was an Instructor of Record. Aunger completed her undergraduate studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville where she earned a BFA in Drawing, and a B.S in Art Education. Aunger was awarded the Meyers B. and Martha H. Cather Graduate Excellence Award in 2022. Her work has been exhibited in galleries across the midwest such as Kiechel Fine Art in Lincoln, NE, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH, and Art Saint Louis in St. Louis, MO.
My paintings are quiet, crisp, orderly, and controlled representations of places around my home executed at an intimate scale in acrylic on panel. They re-present domestic spaces, and focus on the visual experience of the place.
There is both care and respect in silence and in order. In the work, moments of quiet, stillness, and clarity mirror my experience of spaces in my life and how I encounter them. I aim to capture instances that pull me out of the day and bring me into the moment. Light that only briefly touches a specific spot, shadows that stretch and disappear within minutes, spaces seen through barriers, and colors reflecting from unknown sources highlight and bring my attention to the spaces that might normally fade into the background or go unnoticed. Saturated colors and sharp shadows move away from reality but replicate the feeling of having fresh eyes and the surprises that each new moment can hold.
While the paintings are grounded in observation and representation, I edit and intensify certain elements to imbue each with a more palpable sensation of the moment. An interest in the structure of the spaces I inhabit leads to a distillation of form and heightening of contrast. Exactness of things like peeling paint, dirt, screws, or inconsistencies of manufacturing are ignored. In these moments my vision narrows, I don’t see the space’s imperfections. I idealize the scene and remove distractions to extend the brevity of the moment and hold the viewer in the space before you snap back into seeing every detail.
My work evokes the feelings of comfort found in the small elements of delight sprinkled throughout an average day. The paintings document a specific place and time and provide snapshots into a period of my life.
