Photographs by Carina Linge in the Jarmuschek & Partner gallery

The windows are shattered, cut locks of hair lie in the bathroom, fallen fruit is collected under a tree. Currants are spilling out of an old tin can, and a disused vintage car is waiting in the garage to be scrapped.

Transience has many faces, Carina Linge shows it in her recent photo series “The Unsaid” at Jarmuschek & Partner visible. The exhibition fits perfectly into the gallery in the former home and studio of the Wilhelmine court painter Anton von Werner: it also bears witness to the splendor and decay of bygone times.

Books and skulls

Using the camera, Linge creates perfectly arranged still lifes full of sensual colors and sophisticated light-shadow effects in order to visualize growth and decay, but also longings and memories using metaphors.

In one photograph, a stool has tipped over under a noose hanging from the ceiling, but there is no trace of the dead person who could have been hanging there. People do not appear in the artist’s pictures – unless she stages herself.

Such as the large format “The Translator,” which alludes to Caravaggio’s painting of Saint Jerome studying the Holy Scriptures. Exhausted, the woman seems to have fallen asleep over a script; books are piled up in front of her, including the Bible and literature about Caravaggio and Breughel – the old masters whose motifs Linge quotes again and again.

A skull is enthroned on top, a traditional symbol of vanitas in art history, especially baroque painting. He also appears in another exhibit, hidden under a floral sofa with colorful wooden blocks reminiscent of distant childhood days.

Harder days are coming

They are silent images, but silence can also be eloquent, especially since Carina Linge adds text panels to the exhibition: “Harder days are coming” is combined with lines like those drawn on the walls in dungeons to count time. In addition, poems by Hölderlin and Hermann Hesse were the inspiration for two work titles.

Carina Linge, born in Cuxhaven in 1976, first studied art and German in Greifswald to become a teacher, then fine art at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She received teaching positions there in 2007 and 2014. Her work has received international attention and is represented, among other things, in the collection of the German Bundestag. Linge now lives in Leipzig.