Astrid Esslinger scrutinizes cultural and social-political themes in her works.
The paintings circulate formally between abstraction and figuration, process and object, consolidation and reduction, as well as between the visible and the non-visible. Beginning with the formal gesture of the concrete brush- stroke, the artist creates portraits and scenes that, in different contexts, accommodate the narrative. The abstraction of painting, which experienced its most consistent realization with the suprematist “Black Square on a White Background” (1915) by Kazimir Malevich, is Esslinger’s point of departure in representing the figurative in her painting. She paints with acrylic on canvas, usually working on several pictures at the same time.Esslinger´s Cut Outs are the direct product of her working visits in metropolitan regions like Såo Paulo, New York, Berlin, Los Angeles and Teheran. The Artist collects cardboard boxes on site, picks out the ones that are suitable, and works with the texts, barcodes and logos found on them. She makes use of graphical strategies for an artistic analysis of global power relations. Her appropriation of logos and pictograms reflects geo-political identity constructions with artistic means, and ironically and critically relates the human figure to the codes of transnational financial and trade societies.
