Svenja Deininger. Echo of a Mirror Fragment

Svenja Deininger regards painting as a process: she does not consider her pictures, on which she often works over long periods of time, to be self-contained entities. It is, rather, that the process of creating an image serves to stimulate reflection and acts as a mental continuation of a form or composition—the imagining of the future picture and how it is located in a spatial context are thus essential elements of the artistic process. As if working on a text the artist elaborates and polishes the syntax of her art. She considers her works to be parts of a system that require their interrelations to be analysed whenever they encounter one another.

Her idiosyncratic pictorial composition and the specific way in which the painting is designed layer by layer is characteristic of her works, which balance between abstraction and a figuration that is—at least—hinted at. This method of working corresponds to Deininger’s interest in suggesting spaciality on the flat canvas or asserting a certain materiality that is poised between becoming concrete and remaining indefinite. While the painting support is made an issue the canvas itself becomes a compositional instrument and the colour and character of the fabric assume the function of design elements. By means of combining large and small format pictures and positioning them in a space she creates a tension, which, together with her range of shapes, results in a "Deiningerian idiom." With Echo of a Mirror Fragment, Svenja Deininger will present a number of new paintings especially designed for the exhibition as well as an artist book.

Svenja Deininger, born in 1974 in Vienna, lives and works in Vienna.

Curated by Jeanette Pacher