Artist
CV


Cultural Producer


Language
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Cultural Producer
Artist Statement
While painting is the focus of my work, I consider drawing and photography as additional tools that inform my painting practice from their own perspective.

Painting

Coming originally from drawing, I've been able to consolidate my painterly repertoire of forms through numerous studies on paper since 2017. In 2018 I started to work on medium and large format canvas. The results are gestural, almost abstract paintings with sometimes thick, impasto application of paint, as well as works that show greater detail through differently designed, graphic elements and thus suggest a figuration.

Credits
Nina Pettinato (2022): 'Des visages, des figures', acrylic on canvas, 160x120cm.

In the paintings, I'd like to design a pictorial world that strives for figuration through the use of linear structures, but never clearly defines itself. These linear objects contrast with the painterly background. They appear as simple, linear signs that can condense into complex, three-dimensional structures. This creates a narrative that can be read in different ways. The aim is to let entropic chaos collide with structural order, advancing dissolution with continuous construction: the studio becomes a laboratory in which a form of evolution process is simulated.

Drawing

The drawings - that were made with classical pen and Indian ink on paper and canvas preeminently between 2005 and 2011 - provide me with an important compositional orientation aid for the further development and concentration of the graphic elements in the painting. Thus the drawing offers the painting, which in my opinion deals with and reproduces purely inner-psychic imaginary worlds, a rational, structuring system of coordinates. As part of the drawing process, you develop a kind of formula. In the painting process however, this formula comes into use and ultimately can only succeed or fail.

Credits
Nina Pettinato (2005): 'Sie hat Dich längst berührt', ink and acrylic on paper, 32x49cm.

Photography

As the artistic examination of photography began many years before I studied art, photography has been with me for the longest time compared to painting or drawing. For me, the photographic process is not just daily practice, a pleasant routine and also a valued ritual, but an active contact with the outside world. Photographing means combining attentive viewing with maximum concentration and best possible openness and impartiality. The process of absorbing the image information is always a mental process and an attempt to interpret, classify and understand what exactly is perceived. Creating a photographic image is a process of appropriation, it means to integrate defined excerpts of the world or details of one's surroundings into one's own life. The photographic intervention transforms foreign signs into familiar, pictorial objects that can be integrated into the media of drawing and painting in the sense of an iconography.

Credits
Nina Pettinato (2008): 'Inkubation', Series with 34 photos, Inkjet-Prints, 30x40cm.