Untitled charcoal drawing Drawing

Mic Linder (b. 1988) is a painter and sculptor with a background in graffiti. As a teenager he painted comic book style inspired figures in pedestrian underpasses and abandoned places. Deeply interested in figuration, he started exploring ways of breaking up his compositions through the use of collage. The figures and milieus started getting more and more reduced to painterly gestures at this point. These gestures in turn get formalized and solid and translated into blocks and flat surfaces in the series that will later become Linder’s geometric works. In his works form, surface and color act as meaningful elements in an improvised, rhythmical and architectural display. His figurative background acts as a foundation that informs the direction of the abstractions. By deriving principles of composition and harmonious/disharmonious visual proportions from figuration and translating it to abstract scales Linder creates a feeling that one is looking at something familiar. This state of ”almost-recognition” makes his work oscillate between the silly and the monumental, between playful and serious, between the physical and the metaphysical. It ́s the painterly equivalent of having something on the tip of one’s tongue and if one were just able to make a little more of an effort... one would find the answer. It’s the known but not quite remembered.