Guidance Painting

Astrid Esslinger scrutinizes cultural and social-political themes in her works. The paintings circulate formally between abstraction and figuration, process and object, consolidation and reduction, as well as between the visible and the non-visible. Beginning with the formal gesture of the concrete brush- stroke, the artist creates portraits and scenes that, in different contexts, accommodate the narrative. The abstraction of painting, which experienced its most consistent realization with the suprematist “Black Square on a White Background” (1915) by Kazimir Malevich, is Esslinger’s point of departure in representing the figurative in her painting. Esslinger paints with acrylic on canvas, usually working on several pictures at the same time. Her Cut Outs are the direct product of her working visits in metropolitan regions like São Paulo, New York, Berlin, Los Angeles and Teheran. She collects cardboard boxes on site, picks out the ones that are suitable, and works with the texts, barcodes and logos found on them. Esslinger makes use of graphical strategies for an artistic analysis of global power relations. Her appropriation of logos and pictograms reflects geo-political identity constructions with artistic means, and ironically and critically relates the human figure to the codes of transnational financial and trade societies. publication: Fina Esslinger ASTRID ESSLINGER Paintings / Cut Outs. Werkauswahl – Selected Works 2003–2013 Ambra Wien 2014 Catalogue of works (selected) by Astrid Esslinger ␣ Essays by Fina Esslinger, Birgit Rinagl, and Tom Waibel, and interviews with the artist ␣ Richly illustrated The Austrian artist Astrid Esslinger presents a compilation of her work from 2003 to the present day with this volume. She has worked as a freelance artist since 1987. Until then she participated in artistic projects of the Linz artist collective Stadtwerkstatt. Her work can be divided into three parallel phases: her early pieces with textile materials and her later paintings with acrylic colors on canvas as well as pieces using an original technique developed for her work while on journeys, cut outs. 224 pp., 175 fig. Pb. € 39.95 [D] *US$ 56.00 ISBN 978-3-99043-680-6 eBook € 39.95 [D] *US$ 56.00 ISBN 978-3-99043-681-3 Print + eBook € 59.95 [D]?/?RRP *US$ 84.00 ISBN 978-3-99043-682-0 Date of publication June 2014 Languages German, English