Conny Maier in Los Angeles: Dust, Desire, and the Fragile Architecture of Existence

With “Dust Bowl,” her inaugural presentation with Hauser & Wirth, Conny Maier brought into sharp focus a practice long defined by conceptual precision and psychological intensity. Presented at Frieze Los Angeles as a solo stand, the body of work signaled not a debut but a recalibration—an expansion of her sustained engagement with landscape as a volatile intersection of climate, memory, and human impulse. Through chromatic force and compositional tension, Maier reaffirms figuration as a site of existential exposure rather than narrative consolation.

Now represented by Hauser & Wirth in collaboration with Société Berlin, Maier enters an expanded institutional and international framework. Her trajectory—driven by independent experimentation, philosophical inquiry, and an acute sensitivity to environmental and interpersonal systems—has deepened steadily over the past decade. The Frieze presentation crystallizes a long-developing visual language. It also marks the beginning of a broader institutional horizon.

Born in Germany and living and working in Portugal, Maier’s multi-perspectival practice forges charged encounters between geological distress and instinctual urgency. Informed by the distinctly different environments of her home country and the place she now calls home, her tableaux merge landscape, climate, and human psychology into climactic scenes in which natural and manmade orders converge—and destabilize. Bold, assertively hued paintings populated by misshapen figures, interspecies entanglements, and symbolically charged motifs infuse seemingly paradisiacal landscapes with latent unease. Flowers, animals, vessels, offerings, and ritual elements function not as allegorical markers but as anchors for emotional and psychological currents, revealing the fragile equilibrium between human intention and contemporary ecological reality.

Marc Payot, President of Hauser & Wirth, speaks of “the vivid world she is creating—a realm she populates with creatures and objects born from her own imagination but somehow familiar and powerfully resonant.” In its “rawness and poetic impact,” he situates her work alongside artists such as Maria Lassnig and Erna Rosenstein. The comparison is not stylistic but structural: like these predecessors, Maier approaches figuration as a register of psychic instability, where the body becomes both subject and symptom.

For Société founder and CEO Daniel Wichelhaus, the collaboration represents continuity rather than rupture. “It has been deeply exciting to be a partner in Conny Maier’s remarkable journey,” he observes, describing the alliance with Hauser & Wirth as shaping “the next chapter of her career.” That chapter extends institutionally: following her major exhibition Beautiful Disasters at the Langen Foundation, Maier will present a significant solo exhibition at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in October 2026.

With Dust Bowl, Maier invokes a title dense with historical and philosophical resonance. Referencing the ecological catastrophe of the 1930s—when agricultural collapse displaced hundreds of thousands and exposed the entanglements of migration, exploitation, and survival—she does not reconstruct history; she metabolizes it. Dust appears less as material than as condition: dispersed, mercurial, relational. As philosopher Michael Marder suggests, dust binds the living and the dead, the organic and the mineral, into a shared state of exposure. In Maier’s hands, it becomes a conceptual device through which sustenance collapses into extraction, cooperation into competition, sweetness into rot.

Conny Maier Steps onto a Global Stage

As Pauline Bodart, Director at Société, notes, “The work feels free and bold while remaining emotionally precise.” That precision—graphic, compositional, psychological—prevents the paintings from collapsing into moral allegory. Instead, they inhabit ambiguity. “Human ambivalences are our greatest downfall,” Maier states. Her canvases resist resolution; they sustain tension at full chromatic intensity.

Maier’s forests, harvest scenes, and mountainous terrains are rarely geographic; they operate as mood accelerators, sites where memory, desire, ecological anxiety, and collective vulnerability converge. Drawing from a landscape inflected by saudade—a tonal register of longing and temporal dislocation—she situates her work within a psychological and atmospheric register rather than a literal geography.

Between Ecological Ruin and Human Ambivalence

In conversation with Whitewall, Maier reflects on the unstable constellations that animate her work and on the question that continues to propel it forward: “Where to?”

It is precisely this refusal of resolution—this insistence on holding beauty and brutality within the same chromatic field—that gives Dust Bowl its curatorial gravity. At a time when figuration risks either nostalgia or spectacle, Maier repositions it as an arena of ethical and ecological reckoning—one that extends beyond exhibition cycles and into the institutional horizon her practice now unmistakably commands.

Conny Maier on Tragic Tensions Between Care and Cruelty

WHITEWALL: Your paintings often bring together human and non-human figures in complex and sometimes unstable constellations. When you are working, what kinds of relationships or tensions tend to emerge through the process of painting?

CONNY MAIER: Dependency, co-dependency, dominance, oppression in undefined patterns. Who dominates whom and why, or why not?

The interpretation of my works should remain as open as possible, whereby I counter the first layers of paint with more concrete scenes that may not be relevant to the viewer. I always try to bring out the ambiguity in my works.

“The interpretation of my works should remain as open as possible.”

-Conny Maier

WW: Landscape appears repeatedly in your work, but rarely as a passive backdrop. How do you think about landscape in your practice — what role does it play, whether conceptually, psychologically, or materially?

CM: The landscapes are rarely specific places. They are ideas of places that appear, for example, as diffuse places of longing. They are important for the mood in my work. If you follow my own clichés, the forest is always something eerie and threatening; the mountains are threatening in a different way. They also always evoke a holiday feeling and the timelessness of carefree days from my childhood memories. Harvest landscapes are deceptive because they suggest a supposed idyll.

The landscape is therefore a mood accelerator in the motif.

WW: Many of your compositions seem to hover between cooperation and competition, care and aggression. How do you approach these ambivalent states in the studio, and what draws you to them?

CM: Human ambivalences are our greatest downfall. Wanting to do “good” but doing cruel things. Man is a tragic animal.

The Search for What Comes Next

WW: Living and working in Portugal has become an important part of your everyday environment. How does place shape your way of seeing, and how — if at all — does that filter into the work?

CM: Portugal lies at the westernmost tip of Europe when viewed from above — the end of Europe. The light in Portugal is almost the same as in California. I would say that it (the light and the country) has more melancholy than overseas. I like to take that with me as a current. The Portuguese term “saudade” certainly has an influence on the region and is not insignificant as an inspiration.

“I am preoccupied with human existence and humanity’s place in the world/environment/surroundings.”

-Conny Maier

WW: Your recent exhibition “Beautiful Disasters” brought together a substantial body of work. Looking ahead from that point, what questions feel most present for you in the studio now?

CM: Where to?

WW: “Dust Bowl” marked an important moment within your collaboration with Hauser & Wirth. How do you see this body of work within the larger trajectory of your practice, and what questions continue to shape it?

CM: I am preoccupied with human existence and humanity’s place within its environment. “The Dust Bowl” represents one of many historical ruptures in which we, as a species, pursue the promise of a better life. Yet in doing so, an old way of living is often destroyed. What are we truly searching for? What do we leave behind? And what do we ultimately find?