Anna Schachinger at MADRAGOA

Artist: Anna Schachinger

Exhibition title: Desta maneira não

Venue: MADRAGOA, Lisbon, Portugal

Date: September 26 – November 9, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and MADRAGOA, Lisbon

MADRAGOA is delighted to announce Desta maneira não the first exhibition of Anna Schachinger at the gallery, presented in the space ENCIMA.

The figure of a diver (Mergulho) swimming under water invites the viewer to immerse themselves in Anna Schaschinger’s vibrant pictorial matter and glowing imagery, in this case directly nurtured by the surrounding environment. This new series of paintings was conceived and executed in 2019, during the artist’s residency on the Lake Millstatt, her studio overlooking the water, its transparency and flickering surface reflected on the canvases.

A foreign body, caught in a disjointed and rigid pose, the diver slides into the water, while biomorphic shapes – tentacles, waves, seaweeds, corals – rendered through fluid and sinuous brush strokes, overlap and wrap up its flat figure. Some coloured signs also evoke fragments of letters that give voice to an incomprehensible and distant alphabet, like an underwater speech.

Ideas of alienation, of being or feeling a stranger, echo in the group of smaller paintings developed in the wake of the diver, referring to a double dimension opposing the individual and the environment, the real and the fantastic world and, from a formal point of view, figurative elements and abstract motives. These two realms are in this series metaphorically represented by the world above and under water, two dimensions that merge and become indistinguishable on the canvas which, acting like the lake’s surface, returns a deformed image of men and landscape mirrored in it and, at the same time, lets catch a glimpse of what inhabits its depths. Rather than a critique, Schachinger invites to a reflection open to a joyful, kaleidoscopic multitude of points of view, where wondrous creatures and European tourists coextist.

The sequence of three paintings entitled A Marina Está de Férias, like a comic strip or a storyboard, depicts a traveller in different situations of a holiday; their elongated vertical size recalls the layered, watery landscape that takes shape on the litmus paper, as well as a batik technique, very popular in the hippie culture of the sixties, and that represents a cliché of an exotic pain-ting style. Witness of this exchange of looks and perspectives, Schachinger’s small canvases are made on linen that she bought during a trip to India, even if printed on its border the label says “Pure European Linen”.

Anna Schachinger (Vienna, Austria, 1990) lives and works in Vienna. Schachinger received her diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2018. She participated in the maumaus study program in Lisbon in 2017 and studied at School of the Art Institute in Chicago from 2010 to 2012. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include: Pensive State with Irina Lotarevich, Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna (2019); Holderinnen, Brennan and Griffin, New York (2018); Lost in Thoughts, fourteen30, Portland (2018); alles, Lulu, Mexico City (2017); white crocodile, fAN Kunstverein, Vienna (2016). Recent group shows include: Prince.sse.s des villes, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); Supervulcanos, Tarsia, Naples (2019); La peinture abstraite, La Maison de Rendez-vous, Brussels (2019); Use your Illusion, Herald Street, London (2018); At Large, Reyes Projects, Detroit (2018).