Echo of a Mirror Fragment

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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. The process of creating an image rather 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. She alternates large and small format pictures and by means of combining and positioning them in a space she creates a tension, which, together with her range of shapes, results in a ‘Deiningerian idiom’.

Due to the alternating application and removal of multiple layers of primer and colour coatings, lines and forms appear to inhabit different planes of the painting – what is in front of the surface and what is behind it seem to be in constant flux. In an elaborate work process, the artist removes or reduces in places the dried paint by means of multiple sandings or strippings only to proceed by applying new layers of colour, some opaque, some translucent. In many of her pictures parts of the canvas are left blank. Deininger thus draws the viewer’s attention to the painting support: the canvas itself becomes a compositional instrument, while the colour and character of the fabric assume the function of design elements. In this reduced colour palette, it is mainly white (in many different shades) that sets the tone. The artist contrasts delicate colour gradients with accentuated lines and edges; dark shapes immersed in shadows are placed alongside radiant and vibrant colour fields.

The artist book designed by Svenja Deininger does not feature reproductions of her paintings. Instead she decided to include in the book assorted photos, graphic drawings, cut-outs and associative texts by Agatha Jastrzabek and arrange these elements in a rhythmic sequence that allows for a more expanded understanding of her artistic production. Leafing through the book one is confronted with many elements that also crop up in her new paintings: doublings (or what seem to be such); playful manipulations of complementary opposites such as up/down, positive/negative, close/far; layers as vertical stripes; minimal visual shifts that evoke motion and the passage of time; etc. The artist book can thus be read as a catalogue of shapes, colours and ideas or as a kind of pattern book that documents Deininger’s artistic methods.