Carina Linge

Allegories of desire

Crucial to the development of Carina Linge’s photographic work up till now has been her extended notion of portraiture. Although she has broken with the tradition of the physiognomic interpretation of the face, she nonetheless explores and evokes numerous references to the history of European art as a means of shaping her own particular portrayal of another person’s life.
She creates symbolic portraits in the form of pictorial tableaux resembling psychograms. In these she arranges carefully staged images of the body, still lifes, short texts and objets trouvés that offer allusions to concrete individuals and their sensibilities. She no longer sees portraiture as a method for ‘picturing someone’ but as hermeneutical work in an endeavor to grasp one person´s life from variety of perspectives, in order to interpret it. This form of interpretation achieved by inventing and constructing an image is clearly evident in Linge's tableaus.
Carina Linge stages and composes photographic views of human bodies into images that evoke the associative realms of ‘eroticism’ and ‘desire’. These are never featured in isolation but occur in correspondence with symbolic references to the themes of ‘melancholy’ and ‘transience’, as well as being linked to images whose unsettling effect is meant to arouse unconscious strata in the viewer’s mind – such as the skinned rabbit cradled in a woman’s arms or the snail slithering slowly down a woman’s back. While this shows Carina Linge following the Surrealist tradition of intended aesthetic effect, other quotes bring famous works of art history into play as visual associations. Apart from her depictions of bodies, she also collected objects from the personal environment of her subjects and arranged them into seductively scintillating still lifes reminiscent of the great masters of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, as well as their grand theme of vanitas, the assertion that all sensuous pomp is futile, since ephemeral.
With all the stylistic, motif-filled, and iconographic references to history, numerous references to the present are contained. In this way the symbol-laden, melancholic content of her works are conveyed timelessly and universally; they are a reflection of the ‘condition humaine’.

Kai-Uwe Schierz

What is it about your studio space that inspires you?

the light

What sounds, scents and sights do you encounter while in your studio?

silence

What is your favourite material to work with? How has your use of it evolved throughout your practice?

the collectiv visual memory

What themes do you pursue?

vulnerability and bleakness, sensuality and death

What advice has had the biggest impact on your career?

An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing. – Louise Bourgeois

If you could only have one piece of art in your life, what would it be?

Bacchus by Caravaggio in Uffizi, Florence

What are your favourite places besides your studio?

old industrial ruins

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