'Premium Pleasures' by Nina Bachmann

Nina Bachmann (b.1990), is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Munich. She gained a Bachelor of Arts Design, University of Applied Sciences Munich, 2016. Nina works in a colourful way with ecstatic emotional states and eccentric physicality. The boundaries between banality and absurdity, honesty and vanity blur, leaving the viewer with an uncertain sense of pleasure. “In us there is a wellspring of hedonism, the little voice telling us that it won’t hurt to have just one more. Most of us know what it’s like to ‘let go’ in the heat of a moment, and most of us know intimately the highs that come with it. But we also know that no high can last. The higher we go, the harder we fall – an unsettling truth.” Using bright and garish colours, Nina gives her viewers a visual feast upon which to gorge as they reflect on their own place in the scenes they see before them. The Munich-based artist works with acrylic and oil sticks on canvas and also builds sculptures with different materials such as modelling clay and bronze. The subjects in Nina’s works are euphoric, intoxicated, and jubilant. They are in a state of arousal. They are even genderless. But their anxious grimaces betray their insecurities and the lingering awareness that all this excess cannot last. And it is this duality that Nina aims to convey to her viewers, who, perhaps seeing themselves reflected on the canvas, are meant to receive a “tenuous pleasure” from her works. “In our daily life we are confronted with pressure, pain and bad world affairs. One of our strategies is to get out of mental overload by immersing into phantasies, daydreams and positive memories to escape from reality.”