FLUID

Julia Tschaikner develops a painterly practice that oscillates between proximity and abstraction. Her visual worlds articulate themselves in layers – visual, formal, and conceptual. She approaches the relationship between individual and society through the medium of the image – not as mirror, but as counterpart. The visible is undermined, displaced, opened. 

Her compositions appear, at first glance, light and effortless, shaped by translucent color fields, fluid lines, and fleeting figuration. Yet this openness is deliberately constructed. The works address disorientation, sensory overload, and isolation – symptoms of a visually overcoded present. 

Zeichnung und Malerei stehen in Koexistenz: Die Linie unterbricht, betont, irritiert. Die Figur ist nie sicher verortet – sie bleibt ambivalent, angedeutet, flüchtig. Narration entsteht im Fragment. Die Bilder geben nichts Preis, was sich unmittelbar lesen ließe. Vielmehr entstehen Bildräume, die zwischen Darstellung und Andeutung oszillieren – Räume, die Erinnerungen auslösen, aber keine Geschichten erzählen. Der Bildraum bleibt offen, durchlässig, vorläufig.

Tschaikner’s painterly method operates at the threshold between the poetic slowness of gesture and the graphic immediacy of contemporary image cultures. She combines gestural painting with a direct visual language rooted in media references. In this tension, a reflection on time condenses – not as chronological progression, but as an internal condition of the image. Painting becomes a slowing-down in the face of accelerated image experience.

Her visual elements – abstracted figures, media silhouettes, signs, fragments – are not bound to any stable origin. They emerge, shift, collide. The artist’s field is permeable, layered with overlays and interferences. 

The pictorial space that Tschaikner opens is not a closed structure. It can be read on multiple levels: formally, narratively, atmospherically. What first appears as aesthetic impression deepens, upon reflection, into semantic density. The compositions unfold like cinematic sequences, like montage – structured but non-linear, visually compact yet open in meaning.

Tschaikner’s painting does not treat images as endpoints, but as movements of thought. Her works resist definitive interpretation, in order to open that in-between space in which perception itself becomes negotiable.

Ongoing series since 2002