Is this a room you can actually set foot into? Are these real, extant places or constructed spaces born of the imagination?

Judith Lindner, who paints these images, in part returns the question to the viewer. It is up to him or her to decide what is reality and what is fiction.

Strictly speaking, it is useless to try to concretely distinguish between the two: the painter bases her work on actual urban or rural topographies that fascinate her. She transports these motifs in a photo or sketch back to her atelier, where on the canvas she then imbues them with completely different realities and visual appearances. Through this process, which often takes many months, Lindner distances herself more and more from the original; sometimes the finished painting may no longer have anything to do with the setting that inspired the work in the first place. The originally designated perspectives and lines of sight shift and change continually on the canvas, just as the coloration is constantly transformed and revised. Though she began by using acrylic paint to procure particularly striking effects in her spatial reinterpretation, Lindner is now obliged to oil paint. Able to mix her own colors, the artist can now directly influence the consistency she wants. Since she glazes the 1-to-2-meter-large paintings in up to fifty layers – like many old masters did – the colors are never pastose but rather almost transparent or powdery looking on the canvas.

Lindner’s color palette of warm reds, pinks, and oranges is also characteristic of her work. Various blue and turquoise tones create an attractive contrast. The consistent inclusion of black is also essential to her work, which as the basic backdrop structures and weights all the pictures. The glowing colors laid atop artificial spaces like filters provoke a hard break with our everyday reality.

The suggestion of ambiguity in reference to concrete spatial references is a part of Lindner’s overarching concept. The virtuoso mix of reality and the freedom to dispense of the original object through painting opens the images to free associations and affixes their position in limbo.

The decisions to re-assemble a diverse range of images through a collage of new visual realities and to alienate them through a process of colored sections and perspectival shifts are born of one and the same artistic intention: to construct spaces and spatial illusions through painting that make you want to explore them to unearth what is really there.

Almut Andreae