Page 8 - Katalog Sigrid Dessers Version 418.indd

Swimmer – Losing realism and gaining abstraction
By Dr. Dirk Tölke

You see swimmers male and female in Sigrid von Lintig‘s pain- turbulence, the waves‘ whirl and the permeation of water, air
tings and maybe start swimming yourself. You see transparent and bodies.
water and yet cannot see through it. Swimmers and divers in a What does it mean to swim? In the medium of water, tempe-
pool are the subject that the artist has observed, recorded and rature and currents on the skin are experienced differently, felt
painted through hundreds of photographic sketches in a kind of as a kind of weightlessness and lightness. Moving against resis-
field studies: multiple persons, children and the artist herself are tance, movement is necessary to avoid sinking. Movement is an
moving in the water - towards a specific direction. The swimming important element of swimming. It can be applied as locomotion
pool offers, unlike river or ocean, clear, well-lit water, a tiled floor for the traversal of space or for the pure fun of being able to fro-
and the possibility to take up a bird‘s eye view from the edge. lic in this medium, having bodily experiences. Training or leisure.
Though the water in the paintings also has a placeless depth, In her paintings Sigrid von Lintig depicts the medium of water
it isn‘t the dark depth of the ocean or the unfathomable depth in a gelatinous state, as medium. Early depictions of the water‘s
of a murky river, giving rise to elements of discomfort and fear. surface often have a stylised, graphic character. In Egyptian
These paintings are palpably harmless and they are approximate. painting the river is a blue surface with waved lines containing
A lot is initially indeterminate. Particularly the experience of loss fish, it is unclear if they float on or swim in the water. After this
of reality or of realism, when, up close, distance and detail are symbolised depiction, a spatial representation or perception de-
lost. The first impression is of a transferred photograph, which veloped in the 15th century, through the Limbourg brothers and
becomes a completely abstract painting. An abstraction that has The Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry or painters like
its inherent form based on reality, but is also only pseudo-realist Konrad Witz. Water is now of varied colour, reflections are visi-
painting, which refers to the present day, characterised by mo- ble on the surface, movements of the surface itself and, through
ving pictures, but, unlike the photo-realists, not to photography‘s the water, fish and the ground. Water is not only surface, but a
blurs. It is, in spite of all the free forming, an occurrence fixed by skin over an inaccessible solidity, which contains four aspects:
the figurative, not an all-over painting, yet in the original already perspective, top view, reflections, prismatic refractions. Monet‘s
it searches for the interface between reality and painterly free- Water Lillies in his gardens in Giverny work with this parallelism
dom in moments of immersion, submersion and emersion, in the of the visible.

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