Linda Grüneberg

A passage cuts off the sounds of the busy main street. Linda Grüneberg's studio is hidden in the backyard. A steel staircase leads to the bright, daylight-filled space. Everything has its place: a large work table in the center, printing rollers, spatulas, steel rulers, paper tape, cardboard strips, craft knives, and scissors of various sizes. On the wall: assorted activity, work samples, and color experiments on wafer-thin, freely hanging sheets of paper, which even the slightest breeze sets into gentle motion.

Opposite the work area is an antique sofa, almost a piece of furniture, in contrast to the space that houses it, yet complementary to the works being created here. This studio speaks of its artist, her essence, and the nature of her work. In her work, we encounter references from a wide variety of dimensions and eras, which combine here to create a contemporary, sensually readable artistic expression. Fundamentally, they are sustained by associations with stability and durability, universality and origin, vulnerability and strength.

As early as the first century AD, so-called stone images (t'a-pen) were in use in China. These were created by rubbing stone and bronze reliefs, as well as gravestones, onto paper or fabric. These facsimiles served to disseminate and preserve knowledge. In European Surrealism, frottage became a means of revealing the unconscious; postmodern philosophy, in turn, employed frottage as an image of phenomenal constitution. The genesis and transfer of this technique enrich the work of Linda Grüneberg—or vice versa. It is the tension between the "if-already," the "not-yet," the breaking away from precision through a delicate penetration of the random, which, however, never prevails in Grüneberg's work.

In SERIES VI, she examines the constitution of a cultural technique—weaving—by imitating the processes of textile construction in the technique of frottage. As warp and weft threads—in the sense of a surface weave—Grüneberg places lines in relation to one another. Alongside different color combinations and weights, she exerts an inner law of organization, practicing textile processing. The frottage lines, which combine to form their own animated graphic surface, are thus ultimately transformed regularities. This transformation of weaving, as a pictorial body, stands neatly and objectively at the center of Blattweiß. Perhaps this is why, from time to time, we encounter associations with a valuable museum find in Grüneberg's works, such as those displayed in archaeological or art history collections.

The artist Grüneberg explores kinships and engages with mentors who manage a vast cultural heritage. Her protagonists include the greats of the Bauhaus school, among them Joseph and Anni Albers. With Anni Albers, Grüneberg shares not only the ambition to create something "universal and timeless," but also an explicit dedication to process, which is characterized by craftsmanship, repetition, and, above all, transformation. While we initially perceive the graphics as structured, mathematical, concrete—perhaps static—for the artist—similar to Albers—the process of working is the decisive and vital moment of inner wonder and drive.

The rush of creating is made accessible to the viewer in the workbooks. These truly remarkable and almost intimate artist's books contain pattern typologies, reflections, experiments, matrices, approaches to color mixing, and document the artist's strategic considerations and research. Order and calm are also the predominant principles in these sensitive notes. They also leave no doubt about the seriousness, effort, and time investment that had to be put into the preparatory work for each work released as finished.

While associations with fabric, cloth, textile, and weaving still predominate in SERIES VI, the scope for interpretation increasingly opens up in SERIES VII. Visitors to an exhibition of Linda Grüneberg's works can thus also train and cultivate their relationship with their own sense of vision. The fundamental principle of weaving—the recurring pattern and the interval—seems omnipresent: urban structures herald the Anthropocene. One could even argue that the human will to create manifests itself in weaving.

This universality is presented calmly and collectedly in Grüneberg's prints; they are both descriptive and soothing. They captivate the viewer, not least because of the carefully considered presentation of the fragile paper. Linda Grüneberg's curiosity, care, and clarity are always palpably conveyed. Back on Main Street, something seems to have changed.

Nora Mona Bach
Halle an der Saale, 2021

Nora Mona Bach, born in 1988 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, studied painting and graphic arts at the Burg Giebichenstein Art Academy in Halle (Saale), and has been pursuing her doctorate at the Bauhaus University in Weimar since 2018. She lives in Halle (Saale) as an artist, curator, and lecturer.