LAVINIA LANNER
Lavinia Lanner (*1985, Austria) is a Vienna-based visual artist. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (University College London) and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2010. She received the Austrian State Scholarship for Fine Arts (BMKOES Staatsstipendium) in 2022 and has been an artist-in-residence in Tehran, Yogyakarta, Paris, Belgrade, Gothenburg, and Rome. 2023 she was finalist of the Erste Bank Art Award as well as for the Kardinal König Art Award. Her latest solo shows were staged at OÖ Kunstverein, Linz, and PARALLEL VIENNA. In 2024 she released her first comprehensive monographical publication Only draw when you are tired with Verlag für moderne Kunst.
Lavinia Lanner’s artistic practice centers around drawing – more precisely, drawing with 3B pencil on paper. She is fascinated by the simplicity of this method, which is the most direct and immediate way of giving shape to thoughts, while, at the same time, allowing her to create and construct complex gestures. In both small and large formats, the artist pursues the ability of a drawing to slip into a range of roles, all alien to the technique, which include sculptures, furry objects, metallic monuments, or, as in one of her ongoing series, brushstrokes. A work that appears to be a dynamic and expressionistic doodle is in fact a precise reconstruction of a brushstroke made by a pencil and a myriad of individual lines that merely convey the concept of the original material. Other series include drawings of found objects, forgotten vestiges of everyday life that are drawn in close-up and resurrected in a new environment and context, whereby the main focus of the work is the ambiguity of forms and their intersections and boundaries. Lanner’s practice is currently adopting an increasingly installation-based approach, in which her drawings surround the audience in unconventional performative settings.
© Simon Krimplstätter