Mainka | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

""Mes amis, mes amours, mes emmerdes"" (my friends, my loves, my troubles)… The trilogy celebrated by the French singer Charles Aznavour (twentieth-twenty-first centuries) is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the painter Mainka. After attending school in Germany, the young German headed to southern France in the 1970’s. She made important artistic encounters, beginning a creative collaboration with the painter Jean-Pierre Vincenti (twentieth-twenty-first centuries) and attended the School of Fine Arts in Aix-en-Provence (France). Her two years of schooling in this prestigious school allowed her to enjoy the sweetness of life in the South of France, a region which she would not leave and where she exhibits her work regularly.\nLocated near Avignon (France), Mainka is a southern painter. Her artistic vocation is rooted in her childhood. At eight years old, a visit to Rome and the Vatican gave her the opportunity to discover the Sistine Chapel. The bright and vibrant colours of the Michelangelo’s frescoes (Italian artist, fifteenth-sixteenth centuries) made a permanent impression on her. Today Mainka embraces that Latin movement, generous and warm, in contrast with the intimism of the northern painters.\nSpecializing in oil techniques, the artist makes most of her colours herself from Italian pigments. These basic materials are regularly used pure by this lover of bright colours. Her large-format canvases also allow her to mix the processes and add sand to her pigments. These grains brought from distant lands come to life in her works. Thus Mainka plays with the material to apply a textured veil on her colours, according to the desires, moods, joys and sorrows that inspire her intimate relationships.\n