New-York Arts Nina Zivancevic


Anne Van der Linden comes from a wealthy middle-class French family who allowed her at an early age to launch into an artistic adventure which he has never returned from afterwards. She was born in England, in 1959, but she was raised in Belgium and then in France. She started painting abstract enformelle age seventeen, only to trasfer her interest to drawing while studying with the famous Amor at the French Academy of Beaux-Arts. Perhaps it was there that she came to terms with her absence of interest for the abstract expression. She understood that the joy of contemplation and a challenging emotion could also serve the language of figuration and that these could be equally expressed through an expressionist drawing. Her drawings thus became at the same time serious and reminiscent of those ancient echtings of Dürer and Bosch and also critically charged and merciless somewhat like those caricatures of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann.
The artist's drawings challenge those 'dangerous' or socially (un)acceptable topics-- she often asks a question whether all our relationships, including the family, sexual and the ones at work - are just a simple exercise of power ? The artist always answers this question in a brave and humorous manner as she reaches for the heritage of her great predecessors, notably authors such as de Sade, Bataille and Frida Kahlo who, in their turn, refused any given socal norms that stood in their way of being creative. The drawings of Van der Linden's are more than provocative- they are often ladden with the 'erotic' symbols as exemplified by the beautiful females resembling the top models placed on the torture table of the Great Inquisitor who, in splashing their sex with boiling oil represents, perhaps, common reason and consciousness. There are also in there the fallen angels who descend from Bosch's inferno and who devour penises in the red houses of Amsterdam and Antwerp.
The constant themes of the artist's obsession are the following: the terror of racism, neocolonisation, consumerism and an overall industrialization of the society staggering both under the social regulations and family norms as well as under an influx of the pseudo-scientific and technological consciousness. And in an ancient expressionist manner her drawings also criticize the sanctum of motherhood, as they are critical of the Virgin and the Saint and of our new Holy father who hides a knife, an animal and a telephone in his pants instead of the penis. We could surely say that the girl who makes love to a phone receiver evokes more a naif symbolism of the neo-technocrat world than that she leads us to the erotic connotation of Van der Linden's image>
The artist complains that despite the fact that "all that she has always wanted to do is to be a painter" she gets sollicited by the publishers only as an illustrator. This is mainly due to her painfully precise analyses of the contemporary society, that is her drawings which often decorate the texts that are serious textual analyses of such. She treasures that painterly approach to color and the painter's material which often does not reveal itself to draughtsmen. Van der Linden had spent some time in the psychiatric wards painting their patients; such an experience has produced the painting "Total peeling" on which a patient tries to peel off her own skin and flesh. In a certain way, the whole oeuvre of Van der Linden's enters the category of "peeling off'' of the conscious as the paintings evoke the reality peeled off and penetrated to the bone. Her palette is very heavy and sombre resemling a bit Diego Rivera's, although her overall sensibility reminds us of some other artist.
The artist has also got involved in theater (through 1990s), performance and film, earlier with her legendary partner Costes. Her short films such as the "Ironing" and the "Well", 1999,treat cruel subjects: the problem of an alcoholic mother and life of a cleaning lady who gets literaly ironed by her boss. And although these films are both committed and heavy just like the artist's very painting they are also capable of keeping our attention on them- the phenomenon which surpasses many a contemporary artist and his work these days. If we were to ask about the number of Van der Linden's group or solo shows in the world we would learn that such number is big; and if we wanted to inquire about the importance or a scope of the places where she showed her work we would also learn that it has been very present in many prestigious places in the world. However, when we start thinking of the artist's work, this particular thing is not something that we begin to think of. The important thing is that her art approves of thinking, so to speak, and at the moment when she flashes her art like a gun or a glove , to the face of the spectator, he takes a good look at it- and starts thinking about it.
Nina Zivancevic