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"Art reveals possibilities of being that can be arrived at only by looking at
existence from other points of view, expanding our perception of self
and reality through new forms, words, and expressions."
– curator Luigi Fassi
New York, NY - Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Calvairate, an exhibition of new work by Austrian painter Svenja Deininger (b. 1974; Vienna, Austria). For her fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, Deininger continues her intuitive exploration of color and form.
Through her improvisational process of painting, revising, and repainting, Deininger reveals abstract compositions defined by layered planes of rich colors, subtle textures, and delicate patterns. Beginning with a single form—little more than a shadow or memory of form—Deininger's compositions unfold slowly over time, as she carefully reworks the surfaces, revealing areas of opaque color and raw linen alongside thick, layered patches of color. Products of time, place, and process, Deininger's paintings nevertheless seem to deny all evidence of their making-their surfaces preternaturally devoid of brushstrokes, the layers of paint visible at the edges of the canvas providing the only index for how the work came into being.
With Calvairate, Deininger presents a new suite of untitled paintings, developed concurrently over the course of the past year in her Milan studio. With these paintings, Deininger builds upon an earlier body of work, borrowing shapes, patterns, and colors she has used before. Formed by gently curving vertical lines and rounded corners and subtle cross-hatching, these visual motifs appear and reappear throughout the exhibition—modulating slightly upon each recurrence. Rich, saturated hues—indigo and cerulean, crimson and maroon, chartreuse—appear throughout the work, lending these paintings a concreteness unusual for Deininger's work.
Understood, at first, as pure abstraction, Deininger's work is not—like much of the history of geometric abstraction—a rejection of the physical world; rather, the artist's intuitive geometries offer ceaseless allusions to the material. Amidst undulating planes of saturated color and delicate patterning, horizontal forces begin to suggest landscapes and vertical lines hint at the architectural while curves form figures and bodies. Within Deininger's paintings, these worldly allusions form a conversation amongst themselves-and with the viewer—taking on new associations and meanings as they emerge again and again throughout the exhibition. The compositions become akin to blueprints or maps, as if, in the intermingling of pattern and texture and color, Deininger is building a world entirely her own.
Calvairate borrows its title from the Milanese neighborhood where the artist lives—where this body of work was made. Located southeast of the city's center, the largely residential district has deep roots in the region—the neighborhood dates to sometime in the 16th century. On a map, the neighborhood appears as a small, irregular rectangle with curved corners—a shape that, without being planned as such, recurs throughout the paintings in the exhibition.
With Calvairate, Deininger continues a conversation that began not with this body of work, but with the entirety of her practice—or perhaps well before she ever started painting. There is boundless possibility to her imagery: entering the carefully installed exhibition, the viewer has the sense that they are wandering into a conversation begun long ago—or perhaps wandering down an old, barely remembered city street. For a moment, the viewer sits down at a sidewalk cafe to join this wandering conversation, enriching it with their own experiences, with their own insights. Eventually, they leave, comfortable in the knowledge that the conversation continues, that this city block will persist. And perhaps, upon the viewer's return, the conversation has returned to the same themes, the street is recognized once again—but understood anew.
CALVAIRATE PART II
On View: January 7–24, 2025
507 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
Calvairate, like every new installation of Svenja Deininger’s work, began much as a writer begins a sentence: treating each individual painting as a word, the artist carefully arranges them within the gallery to create a sense of rhythm, of purpose, of meaning. From this, a meandering conversation arises—as Deininger’s lines and forms and colors and patterns flow in and out of one another, shapes, colors, and patterns appear and reappear as ideas turn over again and again.
For Calvairate Part II, Deininger rewrites the exhibition, moving it to Marianne Boesky Gallery’s adjoining gallery space at 507 West 24th Street. In its first iteration, the exhibition appeared in a narrow, winding gallery demarcated by self-contained spaces, creating tantalizing, provocative sight lines as the viewer rounded corners. In its second iteration, the exhibition appears in a large, open gallery space flooded with natural light. In this space, the flow of the sentence—the conversation created among these paintings—shifts fundamentally: a quiet, ambling conversation opens up to new ideas, to new connections throughout the gallery.
“Were these paintings” critic Martin Herbert once wrote of Deininger’s work, “arranged in a different sequence, they would resonate anew.” The sense that a new installation would offer a radically new experience of the paintings is something often written of Deininger’s work—but rarely experienced. With Calvairate Part II, Deininger puts this theory to work, rearranging the same paintings, rewriting the sentence with the words in another order. And once again, Deininger proves that her paintings—that art itself—reveals possibilities only found in looking again.
ABOUT SVENJA DEININGER
Deininger has exhibited extensively across Europe and the United States. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; Secession, Vienna, Austria; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria; and the Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna, Austria. She has been featured in group exhibitions at the Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; the Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nuremberg, Germany; Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland; Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria; the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Belgium; Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland; and the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna Austria, among others. Deininger studied at the Kunstakademie Münster and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She lives and works in Vienna, Austria, Milan, Italy, and Berlin, Germany.
