CARINA LINGE
TEXTS (SELECTION)
Carina Linge – The Unsaid
Exhibition: Oct 12-Nov 16, 2024 | Jarmuschek + Partner
Atmospherically and symbolically charged photographs, presented in multi-part image tableaux, are characteristic of Carina Linge's artistic approach. With her latest works, the Leipzig-based artist continues her series of psychogram-like portraits of selected female artists. She also takes a look at herself.
Profound emotional worlds become visible in Carina Linge's perfectly staged still lifes and body paintings. Sensual beauty meets a great melancholy and fragility, which not only relates to the protagonists in their individual situations, but can also be felt on a higher level. Losses, changes and the challenges of new phases of life are tangible in many different ways.
A vintage car without a license plate waits in a garage. A red thread leads the viewer to an old photograph. A number of aging toy building blocks are placed on a flowered sofa, while a human skull lies on the floor below. Tracing hidden childhood memories and family histories, many of the photographic motifs are small emotional journeys through time that lead us back to the people portrayed and situate them socially. Carina Linge translates the personal states and dispositions into intuitively readable images full of enigmatic references and socio-political allusions. The subconscious and long forgotten also come to light: a figure disappears ghost-like into the darkness, moths as symbols of the psyche appear in surprising places. Time and again, clues point to perceived connections that mingle with the hopes, longings and needs that characterize human existence, identities and relationships.
In Carina Linge's work, literary quotations and art historical references are also subliminal evidence that love and death have always moved people universally. Classic elements of baroque still lifes, such as a flawless but dead bird and flowers that blossom for a short time, point to transience as vanitas symbols. Meanwhile, poems by Hölderlin and Hermann Hesse provide the inspiration for two of the work's titles. With a central image, the artist alludes to the painting St. Jerome by the Italian painter Caravaggio. Like the learned Bible translator, Carina Linge stages herself here in a billowing cloak at a table with books. In contrast to Caravaggio's male protagonist, the viewer is not deprived of the exhaustion caused by the tasks and the attempt to fulfill an expectation of this person’s role in professional and private life. Is this contemporary transparency, an outcry or simply a description of the current situation? Carina Linge uses her own medium and transforms the emotions of our present directly into strong, catchy images that can be read and understood individually - and that are moving.
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Carina Linge was born in Cuxhaven in 1976 and lives in Leipzig. After studying art, German language and literature in Greifswald to become a teacher, she studied fine art at the Bauhaus University Weimar under Prof. Elfi Fröhlich and Prof. Norbert W. Hinterberger. She received teaching assignments there in 2007 and 2014. Carina Linge's works have already been internationally recognized and are represented in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow (MOCAK), Poland, the Free State of Thuringia, the Kunsthalle Rostock and the collection of the German Bundestag, among others. At the beginning of this year, her current Tableau L.E. was shown in the exhibition The Bad Mother curated by Katharina Schilling at Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin. Her work Verschüttete Milch was subsequently selected and reviewed for the cover of the renowned art magazine Kunstforum International. During this year's German Catholic Day in June, Carina Linge's photographic series Nachsommer was presented in a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Erfurt.
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Carina Linge – “New Age of Dissent”
Exhibition October 17 – November 14, 2020 | Jarmuschek + Partner
as part of the European Month of Photography Berlin (EMOP)
In naming her latest series ‘New Age of Dissent’, the artist Carina Linge cleverly forges a link with Notes from the New Age of Dissent, the compilation of blog texts by the British journalist, author, and feminist, Laurie Penny, published in 2011. Penny, a self-declared feminist futurist, writes angry, passionate, and at the same time thoroughly humorous texts about the fears and frustrations that most of the younger generation know only too well. She thus gives a voice to those who can express their silent fears only as a persistent sense of dissatisfaction. The same can be said also of the female artists presented, along with their work, in Linge’s psychogram-like portraits in the form of tableaux. In rendering visible the subjects’ inner emotional worlds, the photographs subtly reveal insights into the phenomena of our time that trouble and drive these artists – sexual identity, exclusion, discrimination, critiques of capitalism, et al.
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100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht | 19 + 1 Künstlerinnen
Exhibition in the parliamentary lobby of the Reichstag building in Berlin (2019)
-> Kristina Volke about Carina Linges Scaramouche (NK. Doege) (in German language)
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Carina Linge – “A Primo Ad Extremum”
Exhibition September 29 – October 27, 2018 | Jarmuschek + Partner
as part of the European Month of Photography Berlin (EMOP)
Objects that have a personal ideal value due to their history, their uniqueness or an emotional bond can be found in almost every apartment. Often they are presented like little treasures, are showcased items as well as an individual object memory. Against the background of historical art chambers, Carina Linge stages in her latest works those things that are of particular value to their owners for personal reasons. The private treasures are lavishly illuminated and displayed together with those from existing collections. The results are auratic photographs that line up like an object catalog with very own individual stories and meanings, entering into a mutual and multi-layered dialogue. Together with selected objets, the photographs are integrated in an installation that is creating a complex, tense and associatively charged frame of reference that goes far beyond any original meaning.
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Carina Linge + Corinne von Lebusa - “In den Tiefen der Gründe"
Exhibtion November 5 – Dezember 10, 2016 | Jarmuschek + Partner
A stream of images, thoughts and emotions affects us every night anew. It leaves us in a confused, anxious, ashamed, excited or yearning condition, most of the times deeply moved. The disconnected and absurd things appearing in our memory are raising our suspicion, that our self-perception as a modern, thinking and self-controlled being is actually a pure delusion, whereas in truth we are spending a third of our life time in a form of madness...
The exhibition „In the Abysses of Reasons“ by Carina Linge and Corinne von Lebusa is about this parallel universe, which, despite being intimately close, always seems disconnected and impalpable after all. The two artists are less seeking to figure out a reasonable or scientific approach to this theme, but rather to create a nocturnal pictorial world that connects the real and the surreal before our awake eyes and thus shows us an essence of those emotions, desires, fears and abysses that are usually conveyed by dreams more intensely.
The powerful figures and abstract formations in Corinne von Lebusa’s works seem to be vivid but yet mysterious pictograms of passion, eroticism and roll playing games. Self-consciously female, enjoying and playful, they require the view and provoke the reaction of the presumed voyeur, coquetting sometimes winking and inspiring, sometimes mocking and threatening with enactment, gestures, stereotypes and phantasies. Torn between fascination and self-interrogation, the viewer gets captivated. Attempting to comprehend the message of the seen, he is referred to his own personality and associations again and again.
In her sophisticated staged photographies, Carina Linge creates a mysteriously diffuse atmosphere, in which subconscious wishes and fears become tangible and everyday things get blurred. With deliberately placed references to well-known works of art history – from Marcel Duchamp to Francis Bacon to Gerhard Richter– she uses a familiar pictorial world as a key to get to the bottom of the modern being’s emotional constitution and fragility. Blankspaces are filled in by personal memories, the visible gets augmented by imaginary and motion becomes an expression of the feeling itself. Carina Linge lets us look melancholically at a nebulous area between reality and fiction, where nothing is defined yet, and that might be a mirror as well as a hiding place.
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