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Artist statement

I mostly work in printmaking – mainly etching, aquatint and drypoint. I am fascinated by man-made sites and their spatial structure, the peculiarity of how space extends into the depths, how it lies flat but still seems to hint at almost endless expanses, its spaciousness and its narrowness, its wafer-thin appearance, and how it abruptly cuts into the planar surface. This also makes me question my own perception and gives rise to higher-level questions such as what is real and what merely appears to be. Who knows, whether a white surface is a meter-thick wall or just dense clouds of mist?

2021, by Christina Kirchinger

Interviews

(…) She prefers to draw the harsh and banal reality of our immediate surroundings, such as monotonous concrete architecture, frightening construction machinery or boring rows of houses. She recognises the hidden aesthetic and poetic potential of this unspectacular, cold world and exposes it or puts it into it. Enigmatic places emerge that release our feelings and imagination. (…)

[Untiteled speech] 2018
by Dr. Maren Holst-Jürgensen, Galerie Jürgensen

(…) In daydream-like sequences of etchings, the artist Christina Kirchinger roams fragile horizons and light landscape spaces whose natural inventory has been reduced to marker poles and landmarks in order to provide apparent architectural orientation. The shadowy verticals appearing in the otherwise horizontally dominated landscape pieces are reminiscent of man-made cultural landscapes, which in the situation of abandonment have an inherent transient charm. Shadow is generated from light, narrowness grows from free space, the diametrical interweaving of pairs of opposites enables the artist to interweave her empty pictorial spaces with threads of tension that touch us seekers existentially. (…)

Shaded spaces against black, 2016
by Sabine Schneider M.A.

(…) First of all, however, it is about the physical space in which we all move, which we cannot imagine ourselves without, and it is about the solution that seems self-evident to us to capture it in the surface: perspectivity. Christina Kirchinger is a master of etching, which was developed during the Renaissance. She draws spaces, more precisely, almost empty spaces; at any rate, one has the impression that her pictures are less about what is in spaces and what takes place in them, but that they are fundamentally about spatiality itself and its pictorial exploration. (…)

Physical space and the play with perspective, 2016
by Gabriele Mayer, art critic