“Not a day without a line” – Lavinia Lanner’s medium is drawing. She meticulously adds stroke after stroke, layer upon layer, always with a 3B pencil. If the pencil were too soft, the drawing would become too dark and lose its nuance; if it were too hard, it would damage the surface of the paper.

Meanwhile, the artist became known for fine, imaginative abstractions whose forms always – intentionally by the artist – allow for ambiguity and a pleasurable recognition of real models. Hybrid, unprecedented forms made up of thousands of precise strokes made from the wrist, through which Lanner’s new creations experience a dynamization, emerge sublimely from the paper or lead the viewer’s gaze into the depths. Lanner herself therefore likes to describe her drawing process as a sculptural gesture. The passionate draughtswoman, who has had numerous exhibitions and work stays abroad (Italy, France, England, but also Iran and Indonesia), studied in a painting class (Hubert Schmalix). Lanner’s aim, however, remained the exploration of the medium of drawing, the immediacy and spontaneity attributed to it, the thematization of her artistic practice, perception, but also time.

Mira Klug’s works are also based on everyday actions. For “Leibliches Ornament” (2020), for example, she spent years peeling mandarins, pressing and archiving their peels and then transforming this subjective practice into an abstract formal language. For the series “imāgo” (2023), the artist used an AI generator to generate new votive figures – as a revival of an old practice that was particularly common in the Baroque era, a time of great popular piety^[1]. These computer-generated motifs (mostly illegible, abstract forms) were then cast in wax. With these works, the artist refers, among other things, to time, transience, but also memory and repetition, whereby repetition always promises continuity, “memory in a forward direction” (Søren Kierkegaard) – the past returns through repetition.

For her most recent series “Interwoven images of images, images of texts, images of images of images” (2024), the votive images produced by Klug were deformed again and photographed in analog form, the worries, hopes and fears contained in them melted down again, emotions and memories deformed. Mira Klug is not only interested here in archaeological processes in which materials and time are in a constant state of flux and, through her methodology, also poses questions about possible futures and the mutability of structures.

Curator: Birgit Laback

[1] Votive figures were donated for a hoped-for or already completed rescue from an emergency.

In cooperation with Galerie Rudolf LEEB