Tina Berning  The Listeners

Opening: Thursday, the 22^nd of January 2009
Exhibition from Janary 23^rd to March 7^th 2009


For the first time, the Andreas Binder Gallery is showing an exhibition by the artist Tina Berning.

“The way in which an image of a person is transformed is one of the most arresting messages communicated to us through the art of drawing”¹. In her drawings, Tina Berning constantly explores the web of relationships between conditioned aesthetics and supposed self-determination in the popular canon of contemporary art. With her drawings and collages, she formulates her own image of the human body, its inadequacy and its fundamental relation to beauty. Her works present studied gestures that refer to compulsion and repression. Tina Berning’s works are a comment on the familiar presentation of the human being that, caught up in the interplay between voyeurism and exhibitionism, willingly subordinates itself to the rules prescribed by the media. At the same time, her illustrations document the way in which dissonance is directly dependent on this convention.

Her figures are always gracefully depicted, yet their beauty usually remains imperfect. Streaks of colour lie like shadows over the delicate silhouettes, bodies come hurtling down and smudge-like blots cover the form. Her drawings characteristically feature superimposed ruled lines, which express her exploration of the ambiguity of words.