Christian Lindow

After exhibiting geometric sculptures and conceptual photographs, Christian Lindow began to paint in an illustrative style. Before long, his paint thickened, became more gestural, and his motifs became indistinguishable from brisk, broad brushstrokes that characterize the overall architecture of his paintings. While the artist’s output from 1977 onward seems to fall squarely within the then-dominant currents of Germanic Neo-Expressionism, Lindow’s paintings sever the association we have come to take for granted between, on the one hand, the discernible intensity and speed of their execution and, on the other, the expression of the artist’s subjectivity. The vast majority of his paintings feature a single, central motif. Selected for their ubiquitous quality, they appear to us as readymade images. And even when he selects subjects that come from his immediate surroundings, such as his own recent figurative wooden sculptures, or his wife’s face, the quality (or lack thereof) of his reproductive treatment suggests an already mediated origin. —Fabrice Stroun