Maria Pomiansky
Triptych
“Madame l’Ambassadeur”
Oil on canvas, 2020–2023
Madame l’Ambassadeur contemplates the three paintings. The portraits not only narrate about the artist Esther Eppstein. The triptych of large-scale oil paintings is a reflection of time, a mirror image on the surface of the canvas, “mise en abyme,” a picture within a picture within a picture.
Between 2020 and 2023, Maria Pomiansky portrays the artist Esther Eppstein in her roles in the art world. “Triptychon“ deals with the tradition of portrait painting as a document of time.
Salonière, Ambassador, Artist
In January 2020, Madame l’Ambassadeur Esther Eppstein returns from an extended Tea-Time-Residence in London to Zurich. A few weeks later, the pandemic is declared, and public life worldwide comes to a standstill. Madame l’Ambassadeur is forced to reconsider her commitments because the carefully planned future does not materialize: the message salon embassy conference for the fifth anniversary is canceled.
Nevertheless, Madame l’Ambassadeur remains somewhat active and visits message salon embassy scribe Maria Pomiansky for tea and conversation in her painting studio in Zurich-Altstetten. The artist’s studio has become one of the few places where artistic life can occur through real encounters.
Madame l’Ambassadeur now has plenty of time to reflect on life and art and her relationship to the Zurich art scene. She wraps her turquoise negligee around her legs and asks the painter if she can sit for her as the message salon Salonière model. A portrait in the tradition of depicting the person in a compression of time and space, surrounded by relics of the lived artist’s life and translated into an artistic collaboration between painting, scenography, and performance.
The model and the artist spend several hours together in the studio over weeks. In this intimate setting of model and painter, the boundaries between canvas and reality gradually blur, many conversations jump between the topics of art and life, friends and enemies, future and past, family stories from Zurich, Moscow, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. In between, there is Russian tea, and eventually, Maria Pomiansky puts the brush aside, the portrait is finished.
In the summer of 2020, the painting is exhibited for the first time in the art showcase “Die Diele” on Langstrasse as part of the installation “message salon embassy presents The Non Conference Papers”.
The virus is not tamed in 2021, the world continues stumbling from lockdown to lockdown, and during another sad teatime at Restaurant Schlauch, Madame l’Ambassadeur receives the saving telephone call of Esther Eppstein being awarded the Prix Meret Oppenheim. The outlook is now more favorable; the artist’s life makes sense again in this time of standstill shaken by all kinds of (self-)doubts.
Madame l’Ambassadeur is now officially a successful artist and self-invented art space gallerist, and the appropriate wardrobe for it is the legendary Armani suit, black dots on sand-golden velvet. A new portrait is undertaken in Maria Pomiansky’s studio, and the thread of the narrative about the successful gallery owner and ambassador continues. Esther Eppstein sits confidently as a model in the studio, the iconic portrait of the Salonière in the background.
In the spring of 2021, filmmaker Marie-Eve Hildbrand and photographer Douglas Mandry, commissioned by the Federal Office of Culture, visit Esther Eppstein during one of those portrait sessions. The video portrait and the photos are published on the occasion of the Prix Meret Oppenheim award ceremony, with the studio situation and the painter taking a prominent place. In Basel, Maria Pomiansky is also honored by the Federal Office of Culture with a Swiss Art Award, her presentation in the competition shows drawings about the Zurich art scene, including the painting of the message salon Salonière.
In December 2021, Esther Eppstein opens the art space “message salon embassy Réception” in a small shop in Zurich-Aussersihl. Madame l’Ambassadeur receives guests in the Réception for tea, conversation, and advice, surrounded by photo albums, souvenirs, record collection, TV monitor, fanzines, and the portrait of the ambassador, as part of the Embassy interior.
In the spring of 2022, the pandemic has subsided, the cultural scene still stutters, and Esther Eppstein wonders, what next in art? There is no going back to how it was before. Existential fears, the absence of social contacts, the fragmentation of society – also in the cultural scene, have profoundly changed perceptions. Russia invades Ukraine, there is war in Europe.
Maria Pomiansky appears with brush, easel, and stretched canvas at the message salon embassy Réception on Köchlistrasse, the third portrait in the series is to be painted on-site, “in situ.” Esther Eppstein and Maria Pomiansky meet irregularly for portrait sessions, drink tea, and discuss life, art, and the world situation. The Réception is sometimes open, and visitors come, and while the painter paints, guests, painter, and Madame l’Ambassadeur discuss the sensitivities in the new era after the pandemic.
The artist Esther Eppstein is puzzled. She sits down, listens to old records from her repertoire, drinks tea, and looks back on her life. Is it contentment? It is a time of retrospection and reflection. The artist in the red workshop overalls, in her small realm in Kreis four, pausing and slightly exhausted, somewhat pensive and indefinite. It will be the longest and most difficult portrait session of the three paintings, a first version is discarded, then restarted and worked on for a very long time. Maria Pomiansky finishes the painting in September 2023.
With the exhibition of all three portraits, assembled for the first time into a triptych, the individual parts become a self-contained narrative with an open ending, leading to the question, what comes next…?