THE UNSAID
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In Carina Linge's work, literary quotations and art historical references are also subliminal evidence that love and death have always moved people universally.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.
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.