Added Jan 5, 2021
From the M.A.D.S. Catalogue 2020:
"Nicole Cecil Bräunig-Reichel lives in Berlin and works in the international management of an electronics company. She began to express her experience in a very sensitive and personal way, reflecting on her personal perception of the world, fluctuating between the presence of death and the pure desire to live. “Everything is ok” is a work that in all its positivity, wants to focus the viewer’s gaze on the beauty of the subject. An unknown body, with shoulders, showing in its elegant and not vulgar nudity, slender and sculpted shapes, through which it is possible to glimpse the breasts and buttocks. The profile is not outlined, almost as if the woman wanted to keep her identity unknown. The artist’s intention is perhaps to expose the boundless force of the subject, indestructible and ready for anything. As a primordial archetype and abstract concept, the female figure is one of the first signs traced by human hands. Initially, in classical art, the beauty of the woman was linked to fertility, as evidenced by the statuette of the Venus of Willendorf; a woman with wide shapes, especially those of the womb and breast. At the time the woman was considered merely an artistic object. An idealized, prized, sophisticated and elusive object; sometimes even threatening, exciting, dangerous and demonic. But still, by definition, an object that had to be eradicated from anything that did not belong to the sphere of irrational. In the story we can see how the woman was Goddess and Madonna, mother and queen, lover and object of pleasure, naked or dressed coded by fashion and the decoration of the representation. In each of these manifold aspects it has given body to the canons of beauty, seductive reflections of harmonies, earthly and otherworldly pleasures. Between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, the canons of feminine beauty changed radically. We passed from pale figures, with barely mentioned breasts, to ladies in flesh, with wide hips, generous curves, and faces with lips and vermilion-colored cheeks. Most of the patrons and artists of the time were certainly not immune to the charm of the features of women and exploited the sacred subjects as a pretext to excite sensuality. Nudity, in the Christian sphere, thus became increasingly ambivalent: an emblem of holiness, purity and mortification of one’s own body, but also a symbol of lust. In the eighteenth century, however, women begin to be more aware of their beauty, which is valued and exhibited. In the nineteenth century, then, appears one of the most revolutionary paintings: La Maja desnuda by Goya. For the first time, a naked woman is depicted in an opera without necessarily having to be a goddess or a mythological character. It is evident how that ideal of beauty sought by Nicole with the work “Everything is ok”, pure and eternal, from the lack of imperfections, has therefore distant origins and is not only a symptom of modern restlessness."