Anna Schachinger

In her work, Anna Schachinger draws upon notions of care, motherhood and women’s spaces, emphasizing the relevance of the diversity of female bodies and the entanglement of all beings with their environment and the larger universe. Embracing ambiguity in her practice, she leaves room for various interpretations. Subverting the supposed neutrality of the traditional canvas, her work unfolds on a variety of surfaces, including ceramics, velvet, and pre-used fabrics, and are often conceived as installations responding to the spaces they inhabit. For Schachinger, painting is always a stage, and therefore deals with artificiality and performance, even if it’s style is naturalistic. Similarly, her interest in the depiction of bodies is not neutral, but anchored in and arising from a queer-feminist discourse. Based on her understanding that subject and style cannot be separated, Schachinger intends to tell non-linear stories. In both Party mit Hexe (Party with witch) and Halterinnen (Holders), the arrangement of bodies let surface and background merge: figuration is structure and vice-versa. In both paintings, fragments of bodies and color interlace with each other, and perspective, space and time seem to dissolve. These seemingly chaotic systems, are paradigmatic of our increasingly amorphous times. In Party mit Hexe, what begins as the five fingers of a hand drifts into an ambiguous form, possibly merging with another figure. Schachinger’s visual language is at times reminiscent of Otto Dix, while also evoking the abstraction of Amy Sillman and the open, discontinued forms of a kind of new abstract expressionism. Appeasing thanks to the use of warm colors, her visual language is, however, far more positive and appealing to a (feminist) ​“We” instead of an ​“I” in view of the challenging times we are facing.

Party mit Hexe (Party with witch), 2022
Oil on linen
180 × 150 cm

Halterinnen (Holders), 2022
Oil on linen
180 × 150 cm

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna