Ammerland on Lake Starnberg has always been a great fascination for artists.
Elisabeth Biron from Curland also lives and works here.
Münsing
- Elisabeth Biron von Curland was born in Rome in 1941.
She was born in von Ysenburg, her great-grandfather was one of the administrators for King Otto of Bavaria, who was under curator, and was responsible for the castles and lakes.
She spent childhood and youth in Italy and Brazil.
She got her name from her husband, whose ancestors came from Latvia.
Ernst Johann Biron, who had great influence under Tsarina Anna Ivanovna, had Rundale Palace built, the "Versailles of the Baltic States".
From 1962 to 1966 she trained as a painting restorer at the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.
She trains her eye and craftsmanship above all on the Old Masters.
Among other things, she and her colleagues are restoring Rubens' "Fall of the Damned" after an acid attack on the work in 1959.
The woman from Ammerland remembers with pleasure the part of the training that she had to complete with a church painter in Nymphenburg, where she learned, for example, gilding, barrel painting of sculptures and ornament painting.
“We had to get a snack in the morning and wash our brushes in the evening,” she says.
Then she works as a freelance restorer.
The artist restored Rubens' fall from hell
In the early 1980s, the Biron couple moved to Lake Starnberg, more precisely to Nördliche Seestrasse in Ammerland.
Here Elisabeth Biron from Curland comes into contact with the group around Walter Raum from Achmühle in Eurasburg, who was already a famous artist at that time.
But she doesn't like his abstract painting.
That's how she feels to this day.
“I'm interested in the old,” she says.
"As soon as it becomes abstract, it is no longer my field."
Also read: Ernst Grünwald, a sculptor with a close eye
Since 1985 the artist has specialized primarily in portraits.
She estimates that over the past three and a half decades, around 500 people have sat as models, including her daughters Anja and Christiana, who has become an artist herself.
“When people calm down, at some point they have a definitive expression,” she says.
She speaks to some of them, like a girl in Gothic clothes in the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Many neighbors in Ammerland are also among those portrayed.
The representations are extremely expressive.
The Ammerland artist's multi-year project to reproduce the Isenheim Altar, probably the most famous convertible altar of the Middle Ages, has achieved national fame.
The impetus is given by the pastor Florian Gruber from Wolfratshausen, who asks the painter whether she would be willing to give a slide show.
“For me it was a time of intense meditation and spirituality,” she says.
The altar that stands in Colmar today is famous above all for the drastically realistic depiction of Christ crucified.
The copy has found its place in the 800-year-old Maria Engelport monastery, a nunnery in the Flaumbachtal not far from Koblenz.
