Stefanie Hintersteiner

Close enough series
HIDDEN Bořivojova
2. 5. / 30. 6. 2023

The third exhibition in the Close Enough series at Hidden Gallery features Stefanie Hintersteiner, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

In my paintings, large scribbles plow across the canvases. Reusable gestures and fleeting strokes are sharing the space with enlarged, almost monolithic details. The ambiguity and openness of the works invite you to focus on the poetry of the images.

A fundamental question in all of them is how to translate drawing into painting. I see screen printing as a connection, a bridge between those two ways of working. The machinery I use, leaves behind their own traces and artifacts, that are then inscribed into the work: the copier adding marks, changing the size of the images, the screen influencing the printed image depending on the density of its mesh. My work process is always analytical: I enlarge, filter, sift through, take apart and put back together again. The format determines the material.

The energy inherent in the line is distilled and made reproducible. Each time I screenprint, using a large screen, it requires strength, that I have to apply repeatedly. Therefore screenprinting, although often viewed as mechanical, is a very bodily process.

During the printing process, I re-enter the process as a decision-maker. The accumulation of traces is also noticeable in the materiality of the canvas. The fabric is discernible

through its weave as well as the fraying edges. The initial rectangle of the canvas is distorted by the application of multiple layers of paint. Here, too, the process is inscribed directly into the material, which becomes deformed and does not only provide the basis for content, but becomes part of it.