Engadiner Post, Tuesday January 12th, 2010
Neocolor portraits, Ocean aquarelles, Engadin winter paintings in oil

With an eye for the insignificant

The St.Mortiz Hotel Waldhaus shows a cross-section through the works of the artist Melinda Muñoz-Hürzeler. The Artist from Pontresina impresses with her super realistic style.
 
Marie-Claire Jur
 
Barely finished with her apprenticeship, she just really got started. Not with drawing architectural plans but with painting. Because the real passion of Melinda Hürzeler was for art, not drawing plans. Already with her first Solo-exhibitions at the Hotel San Gian and the Hotel Waldhaus am see the young Pontresina artist drew attention to herself: from the beginning her colorful Neocolor drawings of winter-polo or of horse races on the frozen St.Moritz lake as well as portraits of music and film icons revealed the creative talent of the young woman barely of age.
 
First exhibition at eighteen
Since her early beginnings Melinda Hürzeler, who after her marriage five years ago took on the family name Munoz, has worked on the development of her style and has testified of it through different solo- and group exhibitions in St.Moritz, Pontresina and New York. An influential experience were her 3-year art studies at “the Art Students League of New York”, not an Art academy in the classical sense, which she said would have been ‘too mind straining’, but more of an art forge, where one learns the profession through an intensive ‘learning by doing’. The daily work in the rented studios, side by side with art students of all ages and from all over the world was an enormous enrichment for her development, says the Pontresina artist, who lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon and is spending a few weeks in the Engadin at the time.
 
Currently there is an anniversary exhibition about the artistic development of Melinda Muñoz-Hürzeler at the St.Moritz Hotel Waldhaus am See, which was opened on Sunday in the presence of the artist. At the Vernissage the Hotel owner Claudio Bernasconi praised the works of the artist, who has supported her from her very beginnings with conviction.
 
The cross-section of her works so far can be seen in different hallways and rooms of the Hotel. Four dozen paintings of differing formats adorn the walls of the main floor. Inside the ‘Jägerstube’ are the early Neocolor Scenes of the Polo and White Turf events as well as portraits. Also from these beginnings are a few aquarelles and pastels in the hallway: they show diverse landscapes and ocean waves.
 
Paintings with symbol character
In her times of study as well as the following years, Melinda Muñoz-Hürzeler mainly occupied herself with oil painting. Thereof testify the pieces “New York Collection” and “Winter in the Engadin”. They show different views of New York City. The attention of the artist focuses on the insignificant, on which one mostly passes by without noticing: a manhole cover, a fence or gate. Usually not sensational objects. But the artist also depicts plants that wind around these manmade structures, grass, flowers and roots that are standing up against civilization. On other paintings she captured the first spring flowers or wilted fall leaves that are telling about the circle of life.
 
Also possessing symbol character are the winter scenes of the Engadin. “Steadfast” is the name of a painting of the frozen lake in St.Moritz, embedded in a snowy landscape. In the front of the painting the viewer is captured by the birch tree trunk. They are depicted so true to detail, with all the structure and color nuances of the bark, with the tiny branches and scars, the ice chunks and snow leftovers, which have been caught in the branches of the leafless tree: winter, a hard challenge for vegetation.
 
Winter: also a challenge for the artist. In many of her views she occupied herself with the theme of snow and its representation. Whether it is lying heavily on the branches, adorning a stair banister or skirts the banks of the St.Moritzlake: to the smallest structural and color detail Muñoz-Hürzeler is depicting the snow, giving it tremendous three dimensionality and fine contours with countless brushstrokes and dots. So true to detail is the painted that an observer might believe to have a photograph in front of him. Objective painting in super realism: that is the style in which the artist is moving around masterfully. Of this kind of art there will be more to come. “Especially summer pictures of the Engadin I would like to work on in the coming year”, says the artist, for whom painting belongs to one of the most beautiful things in the world.
 
The exhibition will continue until the end of 2010. www.melinda-art.com.

 
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