Linda Berger #01

The WAUWAU Pepper Mills Art Edition is a series of mills designed each year by a different artist or artist.
In 2014, the cooperation is with Linda Berger, the series is handmade, hand-signed and limited to 10 pieces.

The art historian Cornelia Offergeld has written the following text on the work of Linda Berger:

The own and the other - from reality to abstraction

Linda Berger's central artistic interest is the transformation of thought processes into a visual form. In ink drawings, etchings, spatial interventions and assemblages, she deals with individually experienced reality as well as its transience and seeks a dialogue between the self and the other.

Pen and ink drawings
The artist's filigree and at the same time dense pen-and-ink drawings are created over a longer period of time. In meditative work processes, Linda Berger draws delicate, atmospheric structures with her pen, which, when viewed from a distance, evoke memories of landscapes, swarms of insects, planetary nebulae, or even geological finds. Up close, one recognizes the countless fine, differently colored strokes applied with a loose hand intuitively out of the process of drawing. Linda Berger describes the workflow as an "empirical process" in a "laboratory situation." It is often months in which, drawing on large-format paper rolls, she works her way to that breaking point where individual expression turns into abstraction and the notion of opposites such as microcosm and macrocosm cancel each other out. "The drawing is near and far at the same time. Directly in front of the paper, the many layers blur into a kind of flickering painting. Over time, states of a map, a plan, a landscape, condensations or structures of a dissolution emerge," says the artist.

Spatial interventions
For her spatial interventions, the artist transfers the drawing into three-dimensionality. She worked for seventy hours on a room measuring about 7.5 m2, which could only be entered through the window. To do this, she swapped pen for brush and covered the walls, floor, and ceiling, as well as the doors, electrical outlets, and cables of the vacant room, with small strokes that condensed into swirls, only to leave bright spots again. As in the paper works, a dynamic of its own emerges in the strokescapes, in which both the artist and the viewer are immersed. In art history, the term immersion is used for this state, in the sense of the transfer of the ego into a state of consciousness in which the perception of one's own person is detached from the real world and identifies with a virtual world. This is naturally accompanied by a change in the perception of time, which the artist explores on several levels in her drawings. "Time is an important factor for me," Berger says. "The process of drawing with pen and ink is about accuracy and about a physical and psychological state that is explored through several weeks or months." Continuous change plays a central role in this process, which Linda Berger also explores through the medium of printmaking, in etchings and silkscreens. For the series "Overgrowth," for example, she inscribed, etched, and printed the copper plate, and then inscribed, etched, and printed it again several times. The 41 different prints resulting from this process trace a process in which the copper plate increases in structure and density in each case.

Assemblages
Linda Berger's assemblages are collages of various small found objects, from utilitarian objects to shards of clay, which she has collected over several years - one might say obsessively. The artist sees in them an archive of "traces left behind," which she arranges and selects according to various criteria. For the complex of works created between 2011 and 2013, she thematized the opposites: Light, light objects were juxtaposed with dark, heavy ones. " The collecting scheme is an intuitive search, an appropriation of information, a neurotic application in the psychological and poetic sense, or even a compensation to understand the complexity of life," explains the artist. "Existing elements of shapes and colors become a repertoire of instruments with individual characteristics that challenge me to create new contexts and compositions."

Linda Berger was born in 1980 in Aalen (D) and lives in Vienna. Since 2008 she has been studying at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna with Sigbert Schenk and Jan Svenungsson in the class for graphics and printmaking.

Size: approx. 25cm
Delivery time EU: 3-5 working days