For many years Elisabeth Mehrl (*1955) has been negotiating the longing for beauty sensuality
and opulence in her conceptual painting. She uses exaggeratedly large pieces of jewelry as
visual motifs alluringly lovely and created in a highly elaborate process of painting. In her
paintings Mehrl consistently depicts the moment of auratic charge as she strips her pictorial
objects of any kind of specific context and presents them without any sort of narrative
accessories. Mehrl's paintings are multi-layered and reflective-they tend toward autonomy
leading to the open-endedness of potential meaning. The suggestive quality of this painting
which is difficult to evade evokes a broad spectrum of emotions and philosophical questions
that predominate over any supposed unambiguity. This richly illustrated monograph provides a
comprehensive view of some of Mehrl's most important work cycles of recent years.
