Exhibition Pii Linz in České Budějovice

Pia Linz – Locations
Exhibition opening: on Tuesday, June 12, 2018, at 18:00.

This summer, the spaces of the Gallery of Contemporary Art and Architecture – House of Art in České Budějovice are reserved for the Berlin artist Pia Linz.
She is an author who is presenting her work in the Czech Republic for the first time, and her primary medium is drawing. In the contemporary art scene, she can be described as a completely original artist with a very distinct expression. Pia Linz's creative approaches are characterized by detailed drawings, always created on site in public space. This decision, to create her works outside the "isolation" of four walls of a studio, allows the artist to get to know the place and the people moving in "her" territory perfectly. Based on such subjective use of visual themes and motifs, she presents works that are evidence that each of our perspectives, how we look at the world around us, is always a reflection of individual perception of the sum of fragments of reality.
Pia Linz (*1964) was born in Kronberg, Germany. After graduating from high school, she studied painting at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main under Thomas Bayrle, Johann Georg Geyger, Felix Dröse, and Christa Näher, and then continued her master's course with Christa Näher. Thanks to various scholarships, she traveled for further studies to Rome, London, and New York. In 1999, she worked for eleven months at the Schloss Balmoral art center in Bad Ems as a scholarship holder from the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. In 2015, she received the HAP-Grieshaber Prize from VG Bild-Kunst for her work. Currently, the artist lives and works in Berlin.
The exhibition in České Budějovice, titled Locations, offers a representative collection of works by this exceptional artist, presenting not only drawings on paper but also spatial objects made of acrylic glass, so-called Box Engravings, where Pia Linz employs engraving techniques.
The concepts of the drawings themselves are not tied to a single creative approach but offer multiple approaches, forming individual cycles. Examples include projects such as "Drawings Connected to Place" or "Fields of Observation," as well as three-dimensional "Box Engravings," belonging to the main part of her work Projection Works and are a further development of three-dimensional Cube Pictures.
Regarding the three-dimensional objects, the author states: "First, I build a structure of acrylic glass in an architectural or natural location. At the selected site, I sit inside the structure and capture exactly what I see around me using a marker in a detailed drawing on the transparent inner walls. Finally, I engrave the drawing into the acrylic glass. Unlike the panoramas of the 19th century, where the observer is placed inside the panorama, here the observer looks at a miniature world of engravings on the panes from the outside. In this pictorial reality, the distance and thus the rest of the world is always contained within the object."
Her drawings are then evidence of a very sensitive connection with the given locality, where she measures the selected area /as was the case with "mapping" the London park or Central Park in New York/ by pacing, and in the resulting system, she places her detailed drawings, supplemented with textual notes that "inform" about the natural environment and passersby, offering overheard snippets of conversations and revealing the events in the place itself.
Due to the drawing style, the viewer gets the impression that they are observing the selected location from above, evoking a closed cosmos. From a distance, one can perceive the overall structure, and by getting closer, the work gradually comes to life based on the recorded details and can be deciphered.
As a final note regarding Pia Linz's work and exhibition, one can use her own characterization of her early work and the cycle with a specific relation to the place "Early Site-Specific Pictures," where the author states: "By attempting to translate the experienced reality of time and space into the reality of the static two-dimensional image, I discovered questions and possibilities with Early Site-Specific Pictures in the 1980s during my art studies that engage me to this day. Therefore, Early Site-Specific Pictures are the foundation and key to my current work.
My experiences and memories from many perspectives within a particular place and the awareness that the place is not dependent on my subjective perception but exists firmly and simultaneously for itself, are critical for finding an order of images and also for positioning the viewer in relation to my pictorial expression concerning the place.
And finally, Early Site-Specific Pictures are close to mapping the way of seeing. In specific locations, such as at the Frankfurt train station, I collected information that is often permeated by subjective experiences and poetic imaginations. I synchronize this into a sort of map, and thus I relive my records and reinterpret them for the specific medium of the image.