Georgia Creimer, Psychogenics V, 2019, pencil and acrylic paint on primed plastic

Georgia Creimer’s art opens up a realm of consistent transformation and expectation. Forms are invented and found, designed, taken up anew and changed. These are long and slow processes that result in ever new transformations of the designs. Georgia Creimer works with pencil and coloured pencil on paper, canvas or walls. Techniques such as digital image processing or projection are used very sparingly. Even though the emerging forms seem to be far from the common shape of familiar beings, they all share a close reference to the body. They are in a certain way evolvements of the body or withdrawals of the body into something that has not yet evolved, into the hidden, into something that is quietly maturing. Through these processes the forms generate a space. They assemble it around themselves or embrace it. They create a space that would not exist without them.

The fresco in the Konzilsgedächtniskirche has its origins in a series of fungal forms that was made 20 years ago. “I covered these objects with small hand-drawn or painted, round-oval forms. I felt that I could continue this activity endlessly and called it Sisyphus. I thought of self-generating structures both in nature as well as in art.” In a painting in 2004 these cells were transformed into a kind of shaft reminiscent of trompe l’oeil perspectives of the17th or 18th centuries which was to appear again ten years later in a transformed way in the series Mond im Hof [Moon in the Courtyard]. The works called Psychogenics eventually developed in 2012 as murals in the stairwell of an open-plan office (meanwhile overpainted). “All Psychogenics are for me something like spatial forms that are permanently in the process of changing and transformation.” (Georgia Creimer in an e-mail) The Psychogenics are assemblies of cell-like circular forms that appear to be extensible at will, something that grows, unfolds, proliferates. They can remain flatly round or can be deformed perspectival into the spatial – simple basic forms that are capable of an apparently endless transformation. With other forms in Georgia Creimer’s art they share the quality of weightless floating.

Psychogenics V in the Konzilsgedächtniskirche is reminiscent of perspectival constructions of the Baroque era or of the curvy ornaments of art nouveau or computer-generated forms. The figure extending into space is reminiscent of wings or of a waterfall (such as the one beneath the figure of St. Nepomuk in Vienna’s Franciscan Church) or of a cluster of cells. Experienced on a physical level, they remind us of basic functions of life, of breathing in and out. It is the elementary visualisation of communication, of letting-oneself-go, of opening up. It shows something very simple that proves endlessly diverse in its evolvement. Thus space is created as a representation of approaching.

Georgia Creimer’s mural in the Konzilsgedächtniskirche shows what happens in the space of this church: contemplation, concentration, unfolding. A breathing in and out. A giving and receiving. A collected being with oneself and a free stepping-out-of-oneself. It is the movement that creates a space of love, in whose development God and people participate.

Gustav Schörghofer SJ