The Bank Austria Kunstforum and the Bank Austria are presenting the current winner of the Georg Eisler Prize, Svenja Deininger. Worth 25,000 euros, the Georg Eisler Prize is endowed by the Bank Austria and awarded by an international jury every two years.

Svenja Deininger (b. 1974) studied with Timm Ulrichs in Münster and with Albert Oehlen in Düsseldorf. She lives and works in Vienna. Deininger’s independent engagement with the medium of painting is marked by a conceptual approach which deliberately sounds out the limits of painting and lends the traditional medium an electrifying actuality. Her mainly small-format pictorial compositions are constructed of basic geometric forms and explore, as Deininger says, »questions of space, of painting substrate, of the transition between the stimulation of the eye and the painterly level, between pattern and space.«

In some places she works specifically with small deviations and irritations against the even balance of the composition and the geometric precision – by means of fraying contours, scraped-off paint, or the positioning of a form at the picture edge. Thus a characteristic of Deininger’s painting is generated by the stimulus of a process-oriented approach applied directly into the picture and also manifesting itself on the level of a never-ending process of observation. The collage-type layering of individual areas of paint with different surface values produces the impression of a permeable pictorial space, in which both the coarse structure of the canvas and its grounding take effect as integral components of the composition, thus going beyond their function as pure substrate. »This creates spaces, not as a translation of our physical reality into painting, not by way of colours as a symbolic language, but as atmosphere – therefore they are actually not abstract pictures.« (Svenja Deininger)

Curator: Heike Eipeldauer