Tina Lechner, born in St. Pölten in 1981, creates her futuristlooking creatures only for the camera: she dresses fragile women’s bodies in avant-garde, geometrically abstract costumes, gives them defensive prostheses, hides them behind rigid suits of armor or expands them into seemingly absurd volumes. In the reduction to tonal values, and to simple forms and surfaces, sculptures are created with photographic means.

Bodies are transformed into figurines which cannot conceal their fascination with Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. But the figures shifting from humanoids in the direction of cyborgs also remind one of science fiction films or Giorgio de Chirico’s hybrids between sculptures and humans.

This is no army of cyborgs presenting themselves proudly, but rather the bodies withdraw, turn away, showing the proverbial “cold shoulder.” For the artist, the social exploitation of women’s bodies is still continuing in the present. Lechner’s works practically reject the socalled “male gaze.” (Anne Katrin Feßler in EIKON #115, 28)

Read more about the artist and her projects in the detailed illustrated article in EIKON #115/2021, 28–33.