Born 1994 | Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
The glitchy, surreal images in the work of Alina Frieske constantly evade resolution. Her ethereal scenes of bodies and still lifes cohere and then fall apart, abstracted by an element that reads at once as refracted light and pixilation. Everywhere there are familiar suggestions of context, but upon closer inspection, dimension itself is off, uncanny. The German artist’s practice intersects methodologies from painting, photography, and assemblage, and her subject is the fraught space between our public and private selves, and the way representation plays out in our intensely networked virtual reality.
Frieske screenshots preexisting photographs—stock images or those drawn from social media—and extracts tiny fragments of these images to use as brushstrokes in multilayered digital paintings. Building up these paintings from rough compositional sketches, she introduces a kind of material collectivity into the space of a single image. The resulting works often depict figures obscuring parts of themselves, hiding behind clothing or turning away, resisting the capture of the gaze. Reflective surfaces abound—mirrors, glasses, water, and camera screens further fragment representational space, suggesting the many layers of visual information we constantly negotiate in our world of circulating images. Frieske also studies the motifs that have emerged in our digital age: the gesture of a hand cupping a cell phone, the particular splay of fingers. The angles and contours of our flattened self-expression have become an emergent language that we all seem to accept and adopt. As social participation increasingly entails this kind of homogenized performance, she considers, what becomes of subjectivity and individuality? How does one participate while protecting something of themselves, without revealing too much? Frieske’s deeply time-intensive process contrasts the immediacy we associate with digital images, while her painstaking manipulation reflects the retouching and editing that goes into so many of the images we consume. Nevertheless, her painterly scenes find some beauty in our blurred, instable reality.
