"We sold our shadow,

it’s hanging on a wall in Hiroshima"

(Günter Eich, 1966)

 

Instead of painting everything, he painted nothing—or what was just barely still something: the form immediately before its disappearance, "slight, incidental impressions of light and shadow", which to him seemed worthy of recapturing—weak, as if in the initial stage of emerging on a photographic print—before their final retreat...

 

Each of Erich Lindenberg’s small spatial pictures seems very reduced, very straightforward, almost simple. If one asks oneself what their theme is, the question becomes complex. If one starts from the assumption that the works deal with concepts of space, then one underestimates their coloration...

 

Erich Lindenberg was one those artists who succeeded in performing the miracle of grounding human beings on a surface - on canvas and cardboard - using painterly means and without constructing a perspectival prison. Out of subtleness and solidity he used oil, varnish, and pastels to weave spaces in which reclining, sitting, and standing figures are firmly rooted in the world and at the same time have acquired new latitude with the corresponding freedom of movement...

 

 

Our anchor for communication is someone’s expression, someone’s face, from which we read what he or she thinks and feels, and whether we turn toward or away from them. The objects in Lindenberg’s pictures deny being decoded, do not have a face but are bare, lacking anything that would allow their quick classification. Thus it is not important whether the object is a skull or skin...