Ulrike Lienbacher is interested in the body as the medium of an individual, socio-cultural history from which the values and norms of a society can be read off directly, values such as those ascribed to purity or cleanliness (associated with order) and dirt (associated with disorder and menacing danger). In her drawings she addresses the (exclusively female) body with precise lines limited to contours, stereotypical figures put onto the white paper. Lienbacher draws young women in a variety of poses and gestures as they go about intimate routines—washing themselves, combing or drying their hair—or in their underwear. The bodies of these women, some of whom are naked and girlish, are often fragmented; All eye-contact is avoided; even when the figures are portrayed with their heads, they are looking away from our gaze, consistently creating the effect of a subtle, erotic interplay of absence and presence. Thus she establishes a formal contrast between her reduced, “clean” flowing lines, reminiscent of classicistic shapes (albeit intentionally fractured), and the “impure” (“abject”), meticulously extracted motifs.
Silvia Eiblmayr

(born in 1963 in Oberndorf/Salzburg, Austria, lives in Vienna and Salzburg)