Opening: Svenja Deininger, Gabriel Sierra & Angelika Loderer

Svenja Deininger: "Echo of a Mirror Fragment"
Gabriel Sierra: "The First Impressions of the Year 2018 (During the early days of the year 2017)"
Angelika Loderer

With Svenja Deininger the Secession is presenting an artist who represents a younger generation of Austrian painters in its main exhibition space. Deininger, who was born in Vienna in 1974 first studied in Münster under conceptual artist Timm Ulrichs and later painting under Albert Oehlen in Düsseldorf. Her idiosyncratic pictorial composition on the one hand and, on the other, 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 her interest in suggesting spaciality on the flat canvas or asserting a certain materiality that is permanently poised between becoming concrete and remaining indefinite. 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 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’.

Artist Talk:
Februrary 23, 2017, 7 p.m.
Svenja Deininger in conversation with Ulrich Loock
An event of the Friends of the Secession