Teresa Mayr on Drawing, Politics, and the Premio Trieste Contemporanea

Teresa Mayr (Friedberg, 1992), winner of the 2019 Premio Trieste Contemporanea, discusses her practice with curator Daniele Capra at the finissage of her solo exhibition and catalog presentation. Mayr explains her preference for drawing over painting due to its immediacy, simplicity, and sustainability—low material use, easy storage and transport. She explores whether drawing can be painting, especially in recent works using pastels and markers. Her process is direct and monodirectional, without the ability to revise, which she embraces as a way to accept outcomes. Mayr's work blends architecture and urbanism with intimate themes like spatial awareness, psychology, and home. She considers her practice political, focusing on how environments shape people, particularly urban spaces that control movement and behavior. Her drawings depict functional spaces emptied of purpose—uninhabited, deserted scenes—to reveal the fragility of societal structures. She combines personal experience with standardized online images, merging objective views with subjective memory to create fictional scenes. The exhibition was held at Trieste Contemporanea in Trieste in 2020.