Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Crescendo, Viennese artist Svenja Deininger’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will feature a new body of paintings that captures Deininger’s fluid manipulation of color and form, resulting in complex compositions that arise organically as she works the canvas. Driven by both formal inquiry and a deep understanding of physical environment, Deininger will create a holistic experience. Crescendo will be on view at the gallery’s 509 W. 24th Street location from October 25 through December 22, 2018.
Deininger approaches each exhibition as a distinct moment in time, following a single conceptual thread or inkling until it completes in a discrete body of work. In this way, Deininger is much like a composer, weaving together gesture, color, and line to create an intricacy of texture and rhythm, with each painting bringing a singular note and weight to the overall experience. Suspended between abstraction and figuration, her canvases evoke a range of seemingly intangible sensations—a fleeting dream, a spark of memory, the indiscernible outlines of a place, or an emotion lost but newly felt. These evocations are most recently influenced by her time spent painting in Milan, where she began this latest body of work, and Vienna, where she completed it. While devoid of any overt reference or symbol, the atmospheric and structural contours of her home and briefly adopted city have inspired both palette and silhouette within these new paintings.
These fragments of experience are made manifest through Deininger’s layering of form and color on the canvas—sometimes over many months and in different locations. Geometric forms, suggesting body and object, meld and overlap with more free-form abstract fields of color, establishing a sense of depth and movement on and beyond the surface plane. This visual experience is further intensified by Deininger’s stripping and recoating of paint and varnish, softening and heightening the emerging shapes and colors. Most recently, a physicality has taken root in Deininger’s work—with the forms asserting themselves more clearly and directly, only tempered in some instances by the use of soft fleshy hues. As elements are repeated, reconfigured, expanded, and dissolved across the slate of paintings, Deininger’s iterative process reveals itself, allowing the viewer to engage with the singular yet interrelated effects of her processes.
Equally important to Deininger’s formal experimentations on the canvas is the design of the exhibition, which in its installation builds to a point of Crescendo for the viewer. A critical moment to bring harmony and complexity to the experience, Deininger is acutely attuned to progressions of scale and repetitions of color and form among the works. Here, each painting must stand as a critical, individual note, while also supporting and developing the chord. This strategic evolution extends then to the relationships and connections established between work, setting, and viewer, ensuring a holistic and intentional experience. The installation process marks the completion of Deininger’s symphony, allowing the engagement with her work to build and resolve—in ways the conclusion of the originating thread that sparks each body of work.
Svenja Deininger (B. Vienna, 1974) has had solo exhibitions in New York City and throughout Europe, including at Federica Schiavo Gallery, Milan; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; secession, Vienna; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Kunsthalle Krems/Factory, Krems, Austria; and Osterreichisches Kulturforum, Warsaw. Deininger has also participated in group exhibitions at Bob van Orsouw Gallery, Zurich; Josh Lilley Gallery, London; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; the Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels; and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, to name a few. Her work is currently on view at Neues Museum, Nürnberg as part of the group exhibition Testbild. The artist currently lives and works in Vienna.
