The female body is the starting point in Tina Lechner's analogue black and white photography. The body acts as a projection surface and is covered, supplemented and distorted with self-made, futuristic-looking costumes and prostheses. These eerily majestic objects combine fashion and sculpture - originally created as metaphorical armour to respond to transience and vulnerability, serving simultaneously as a medium for empowerment. Enlargements of reality, non-functional, sometimes heavy, a weight that the model has to carry during the photo shoot, but invisible to the viewer. A lightness and timelessness that make Lechner's creatures seem natural, the protagonists are not forced onto the stage but born in the process of their creation. Moving between art history and posthuman vision, the work deals with identity and the awareness of it.
Tina Lechner (*1981 in St. Pölten, Austria) lives and works in Vienna. She studied art and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 2007-2013. Tina Lechner's work has been shown in various exhibitions in Vienna and abroad
Exhibition view
Photos © Mike Zenari / CDI, 2024