Tina Lechner »Gina«

Gina, 2015/2023

Inspired by Oskar Schlemmer, Tina Lechner's edition of Gina focuses on the depth and feel of analog black-and-white photography and plays with the balance between abstraction and figuration, but also between subject and object. Moving between art history and posthuman vision, the work deals with identity and the awareness of it.

Tina Lechner

The female body is considered the nucleus in Tina Lechner's (*1981, St. Pölten, Austria) analog, so far predominantly black-and-white photographs. It acts as a canvas and is expanded and distorted with self-tailored, futuristic-looking costumes. The models, who move between human and machine, do not clearly reveal their naturalness or fiction; rather, the human form is concealed with abstract, enigmatic shapes and silhouettes. Thus, Tina Lechner's works express themselves through an anachronistic visual language as photographic sculptures that form a counterpoint to our current flood of digital images, encouraging more profound contemplation and engagement.

In the meantime, Tina Lechner has supplemented her work with color photographs. In more recent works her models have gradually been disappearing and taking on a life of their own. In the process of photographic staging, the depicted objects thus become more and more alienated from the human form and in part become geometric still lifes.

Read our studio story with Tina Lechner.

Texts: Livia Klein
Photo: Gerhard Wasserbauer