Anna Schachinger at Lulu

Artist: Anna Schachinger

Exhibition title: alles

Venue: Lulu, Mexico City

Date: April 4 – June 24, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Lulu, Mexico City

Lulu is very pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Austrian-Ecuadorian, Vienna-based artist Anna Schachinger (b. 1990).

Anna Schachinger is a painter. Her paintings have a lot going on. Labored, tough, elegant, messy, highly distilled, challenging, and utterly unique, what she does feels if not poorly behaved, then ungrudgingly unorthodox. Not only is each painting radically different from whatever preceded it, her subject matter refuses to submit to traditional taxonomies of abstraction or figuration. Technique itself also varies; sometimes the byproduct of a concerted and delicate mark making, the work is, at other times, the result of what appears to have been a really brutal process. It’s as if she were a liminal painter, a painter of thresholds, or constantly on the brink, but to characterize her as such might suggest that her work is ambivalent, lacks an aesthetic compass or conviction, which is not the case, at all. Interested in the confines that bound the medium, her motley pictures seek to collide with and exceed those limits and divisions wherever possible. Beauty, and the typically all over patterns which compose it in her work, is often pushed to the point of saturation, of too much.

For her solo at Lulu, she presents a selection of small-scale works made between 2014 and now. At once quaint, aggressive, homely, gorgeous and homey, these works abide by and embody virtually all of the contradictions that animate her painting. The heterogeneity of the motifs, techniques and materials, not to mention the general excess, of which she avails herself exist in sharp contrast to the consistent and beguiling economy of scale of the paintings. Their general unruliness would seem to undermine their essential domesticity, but these (im)modest works are meant to be lived with. For all their difference and insistence on being engaged with each on their own terms, they have a cumulative, collective beauty. The more you look at them individually and together, the richer, more complex, and finally, pulchritudinous they become (no synonym of ‘beauty’ feels more appropriate to what she does by virtue of exactly how homely and unwieldy the word is). Both perfectly reduced and irreducible, their take-me-or-leave-me charm is unmistakable and cannot be dismissed. Look at me, they say. I am a painting. Deal with it.

Anna Schachinger (b. 1990) is an Austrian-Ecuadorian painter, based in Vienna. She has studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Solo shows include white crocodile at fAN Kunstverein, Vienna (2016), and Bed and Breakfast at Ubik Space, Vienna (2015). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at husslehof, Frankfurt, Transition Gallery, London, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, and Galerie Kunstbuero, Vienna.