From April 27-30, 2023, during the Berlin Gallery Weekend, paper positions berlin presents for the seventh time more than 50 international galleries with outstanding positions from contemporary and modern art with a focus on drawing and the material paper.

Lavinia Lanner studied in a painting class at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but even then she concentrated on the medium of drawing. However, the artist, who was born in 1985, does not see it only as a restriction, but also feels it as "maximum freedom" when she reduces her means to a minimum. 

She consistently uses a 3B hardness pencil for her works on paper, but it can be used to create many shades between black and white. These are created by superimposing short strokes that she places on the surface with movements from the wrist. 

She prefers to work on her mostly large-format drawing surfaces on the wall. Formats such as 170 by 150 cm are optimal for drawing comfortably and without considerable effort and foreign aids, as they correspond to the body size and span of the artist's arms. 

Her way of working in the studio follows a rigid and ritualized temporal structure - which is also necessary, since time and space blur when drawing. 

It takes weeks to finish works, but it is a meditative activity in which she creates a counterpart for herself to "fill her days" with an essential act.

The starting point for designs is often a physical, bodily movement of the artist that focuses on something playful like phone scribbles - that is, something seemingly incidental and trivial. The results are simultaneously concrete and abstract, but always expressive of the artist's physical experiences. Folds are created that can be physical or reminiscent of plant worlds, without being definitively fixed. 

Lanner concentrates on the smallest possible things, which she enlarges, but does not specify or reference, nor translate, but presupposes, in order to create her own, new worlds from them, which have enough air to breathe. Her own parallel realities thus nevertheless remain anchored in the world we can agree upon. 

At Paper Positions, Lavinia Lanner shows, among other things, works from the series of "Portals," which are designated whole surfaces and sketch a twist toward an opening. In a more recent series, on the other hand, she depicts the process itself: it's about entering and leaving a surface, ascending and descending from a stage - in other words, a flow, a movement. Just as the artist sees her oeuvre as a coherent whole that - if you will - revolves around something like drawing for the sake of drawing, she also conceives her most recent works as excerpts of a world of processes that is only completed by the movements of the audience when viewing them.
Severin Dünser, Curator

Lavinia Lanner, Your secret, perched in ecstasy, 340 x 150 cm, 3B pencil on paper, 2021 - Parallel 2021 for Galerie Rudolf Leeb

Fig. at top: O.T. a.d.S. Coming and going, 2023, 170 x 150 cm, 3B pencil on paper
Photo Credit: Pablo Chiereghin