Thoughts That Cure Radically: Svenja Deininger ‘One Second Balance’ Marianne Boesky Gallery

Artists pluck from the past and refashion the old into the new. German born and Vienna based Svenja Deininger is an artist who has taken the relatively small, in her case diminutive canvases of bars of color, white and grey shapes attended by errant marks and the diagonal line, and creates a hushed visual experience. Borrowing from the spiritually tinged formalism of Malevich’s Russian abstraction, Deininger’s grey hued canvases fall in the space between complete painterly independence and a predetermined language. Instead, Deininger allows her paint, whose consistency runs from the stained thin to the toothpaste thick, to abrade and bleed into scumbled fields of neutralized color. Improvised yet constricted, Deininger’s paintings act as a 21^st Century intimist version of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series. Coincidentally timed with MOMA’s Inventing Abstraction, The Met’s Matisse in Search of True Painting exhibition and the Guggenheim’s Picasso Black and White, Deininger’s first New York City exhibition coheres along a contemporarily reinterpreted notion of chance, paint and the doggedly hand-made that is equally at home in Chelsea and early Twentieth Century Europe.