Evelyn Plaschg
Viscous City

For a long period, Plaschg placed the body at the center of her paintings, exploring it as both authentic expression and anonymous enactment. In her early works, she remained close to the human figure and worked intensively on this. Her pictures are mostly based on very relaxed and often playful smartphone photos that are taken together with other people. Using pigments on paper, Plaschg ensures that her painted depictions retain these qualities. The vignettes and actions she paints are very direct and situational, and seem also very much a product of chance. In particular, these portrayals include personal points of reference from the artist’s own context. But these are usually just fragments that are combined with other pictorial elements. Full-body views of individuals and couples are clearly in the minority, while ​“cut-off” faces and hands that sometimes cover up or lasciviously play with other parts of the body are more frequent. This way of depicting the body is not portraiture in a narrow sense, but rather a detailed representation of the physical, often emphasizing the flesh and sometimes seeming more mechanical, then again subjective and personal. These pulsating compositions are situated within a pictorial frame that seems very intimate while yet remaining vague. The paintings alternate between playful staging and the spontaneity and authenticity of a moment. It is this dualism between intimacy and enactment that gives viewers of these works the feeling that they should rather not be witnessing this scene, as they may be disturbing it or they may just be present as (tolerated) voyeurs. This is due not only to the apparent privacy of these images, but also the proximity of the selected views, which are like close-ups.

Exhibition Page