HEARTLAND

LINDA BERGER
Elektrohalle Rhomberg, Salzburg (AT)
8 October – 26 November 2022

In the exhibition Heartland, Linda Berger counters a chaotic, overcrowded world with downright chaos. Starting from the smallest graphic gesture – a simple stroke – the Vienna-based artist creates spectacular worlds. In meticulous repetition, none of these strokes ever remains alone. Like a colorful accumulation of individuals, they vary in strength and direction, overlap and combine into clusters, into form-giving centers. In the combination of the individual, they thus construct themselves into a great whole.

Beyond the specific, the images carry the legacy of an abstraction that doesn’t need to remain one in viewing. The chains of associations triggered are manifold: swooshing floods, stars piled up into galaxies, cosmic dust, mountain ranges seen from a bird's-eye view, and horizons bathed in fog. Searchingly, the drawing in the form of an armada of strokes tumbles across the white canvas, filling and arrange it in chaos. Tenderly, yet determinedly, the artist's working method, through the layering and piling up of strokes, counters a possible timidity from emptiness. She responds to the aesthetic challenge of the white canvas through productive diversity. Sensitively, Linda Berger thus rhythms and composes the free surfaces into wide spaces. The quality of the picture results from the quantity of the formal expression – a meticulously arranged multitude of short strands. Similar to the proverbial forest for the trees, one cannot see the picture up close because of all the strokes. Only from a distance are we able to grasp the artist's fulminant worlds.

Thus, in meditative work, an ensemble emerges from the individual, which never has to reach its end. The contemplative working process expresses itself in an expressive gesture. Basically expandable, the images in the contemplation build themselves whole worlds. For just as the works are composed individually of minimal fragments, they also testify in their joint presentation to the possibility of being understood as expandable modules of an imaginary world. Here too the small individual becomes a section of the larger whole.

The heart of Berger's artistic works can thus be understood as an attempt to grasp the complexity of worlds whose smallest units never stand on their own, but are only bound together in the cosmos of the communal.
Precision and disorder, proximity and distance, simplicity and diversity, the self and the others. Concepts wrongly understood as opposites are symbiotically brought together in the artist's exhibition. And in the end there is probably a presumption: no macrocosm without microcosm, no heartland without surrounding.

– Niklas Koschel

German Text: Heartland | Niklas Koschel

https://elektrohalle-rhomberg.net/

Photos: (c) Linda Berger