Bianca Regl's works are multifaceted. Not just a variety of themes, but also of materials defines the painter's figurative style: painting behind glass, miniatures on balsa wood and large canvases live next to each other harmoniously. In her work, drawing often takes the role of a study, but looking at them exclusively in terms of preparatory sketches would deny the force of these singular images. Graphical representation is replaced, in her larger works, by a vehemently gestural way of applying her brush-strokes.

On image surfaces that sometimes are hardly larger than a matchbox, Bianca Regl tells a kind of tales that are rooted in everyday situations and discuss her home country, Austria, in a partly ironical way. Patriotic allegories from touristic folders about the Alpine regions, by her subtle brush, are transferred onto the balsa panel. Grazing cows in front of mountain scenery may turn up as well as children playing at the well of a hut in the Alps. A Heidi idyll is thus created.

The figure ever plays a decisive role throughout. While in the alpine versions of her images, traditional clothing is given its importance, there are other works where holiday-makers in Italy are sitting in front of a gelateria, licking their ice-cream, or sun-bathing on a borrowed pedal boat in the sea: a sensitive observation of everyday life evolves into the basis of the young artist's repertoire. Accordingly, the subtlety of her workdoes not reside in her graphically exact, miniature-like technical execution alone. It might almost be said that Bianca Regl brings the tradition of medieval illumination in the manner of the Frères de Limbourg up to date through a day-to-day kind of realism to be found in the works of other young contemporary painters.

It is precisely this sort of young painting which Bianca Regl's canvases represent. Her idea of realism, however, differs from the one to be found at international art fairs: by contrast to the works produced by the Leipziger Schule, her images are not over-populated by dream visions, on the contrary, her idea of the present relates to a worldly here and now. Friends and girlfriends, recorded at their leisure-time activities, are transferred to the canvas.

In her Friday-series, Bianca Regl takes on the modulations of the female body. On the darkly primed ground material she uses a range of colours consisting only of shades of pink. By means of these tender colours she moulds the bodies of her girlfriends on canvas, through the contrast of light and dark. The movements of her brush seem vehement, gestural. Forcefulness as well as senstivity are shown at the same time by the way that colour is applied.

In her water images, Bianca Regl moves away from this reduced range of colours: bodies that are moving in a swimming-pool covered by light-coloured tiles, wet patches of skin and the rays of the sun reflected in the water are the themes of this series. The refraction of light in the water and the distortion of bodies plunged into it are symbolized on canvas by means of gestural brush-strokes. Seen from close-by, some of these watery mirrorings seem almost abstract.

Colour, brushwork and canvas are and rest the main parametres of Bianca Regl's art, the realism of her imaginary world notwithstanding. This link to a self-referential way of painting can be recognized in her landscape images. Chains of mountains and coniferes are entering into a symbiosis and, in their apparent realism, will not represent anything but this: pure painting.

Bianca Regl can be recognized as an exciting new discovered on the Austrian painting scene. She still is a student at the Academy of Fine Arts at Vienna as a member of the masterclass of Hubert Schmalix. This autumn, she will move to California for a year to continue her studies of painting at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Fortunately, her painting will remain on show in Austria. In september, Bianca Regl will take part in the group exhibition „painting – real – painting“ at the lukasfeichtner gallery, from november in the exhibition REAL at the Kunsthalle Krems and through to mid-october at Ulmerfeld House in the exhibition „Open Space Painting; Austrian Positions“. Austrian galleries apart, Bianca Regl's paintings may be seen at the recently opened gallery EMB – Contemporary Art at Liechtenstein as well.