Kalin Lindena

Kalin Lindena calls her artistic interventions a gesture. Lines of movement cut into space, twisted into form. Shapes, objects, works that are also the trace of a career rather unusual for a professor at an art academy: the origin of Lindena’s work lies in graffiti. “The artist who sprays” was the deliberately ambiguous headline of an article about her in 2015. Before she studied at the HBK in Braunschweig with Hartmut Neumann, Johannes Brus and Walter Dahn, she was a sprayer on the streets of Hanover. And even though she has herself been in charge of a painting class in Karlsruhe since 2014, this origin continues to inscribe itself in Lindena’s artistic work. Both as a technique and as a subculture, graffiti shapes her practice and her self-image. It is a formative influence that reveals itself in no outwardly obvious aesthetic, but becomes recognisable above all when one seeks to understand the painterly and the sculptural, the installation-based and the performative works as, yes, precisely as gestures. Here gesture refers rather to the mode in which Lindena’s works come into being. Whoever paints gesturally paints in space, as in graffiti. For unlike drawing with pencil or charcoal on paper, when spraying every line inevitably becomes a movement of the whole body. And thereby also its trace. The gesture is not simply a means, not merely the expression of an idea, of a thought already completed. It is thinking in the act!

Exhibition:
Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, 1/12/2024 – 27/4/2025