Svenja Deininger

• Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (US)
• 22.11.2024–24.01.2025

Through her improvisational process of painting, revising, and repainting, Deininger reveals abstract compositions defined by layered planes of rich colors, subtle textures, and delicate patterns. Beginning with a single form—little more than a shadow or memory of form—Deininger's compositions unfold slowly over time, as she carefully reworks the surfaces, revealing areas of opaque color and raw linen alongside thick, layered patches of color. Products of time, place, and process, Deininger's paintings nevertheless seem to deny all evidence of their making-their surfaces preternaturally devoid of brushstrokes, the layers of paint visible at the edges of the canvas providing the only index for how the work came into being.

With Calvairate, Deininger presents a new suite of untitled paintings, developed concurrently over the course of the past year in her Milan studio. With these paintings, Deininger builds upon an earlier body of work, borrowing shapes, patterns, and colors she has used before. Formed by gently curving vertical lines and rounded corners and subtle cross-hatching, these visual motifs appear and reappear throughout the exhibition—modulating slightly upon each recurrence. Rich, saturated hues—indigo and cerulean, crimson and maroon, chartreuse—appear throughout the work, lending these paintings a concreteness unusual for Deininger's work.

Understood, at first, as pure abstraction, Deininger's work is not—like much of the history of geometric abstraction—a rejection of the physical world; rather, the artist's intuitive geometries offer ceaseless allusions to the material. Amidst undulating planes of saturated color and delicate patterning, horizontal forces begin to suggest landscapes and vertical lines hint at the architectural while curves form figures and bodies. Within Deininger's paintings, these worldly allusions form a conversation amongst themselves-and with the viewer—taking on new associations and meanings as they emerge again and again throughout the exhibition. The compositions become akin to blueprints or maps, as if, in the intermingling of pattern and texture and color, Deininger is building a world entirely her own.

Marianne Boesky Gallery