Magda Korsinsky went to Ahrenshoop in 2014 and 2015 with a grant. The village on the Baltic Sea is not only known for its enchanting location on the Darss peninsula, but also for its artists’ colony, which established the town’s artistic tradition at the end of the 19th century.
Magda Korsinsky took up the local tradition of landscape painting here. The titles of her works make reference to titles by painters from Ahrenshoop such as Elisabeth von Eicken, Oskar Frenzel, Anna Gerresheim, Fritz Grebe and Paul and Else Müller-Kaempff. The content of the paintings refers to Ahrenshoop, but not the compositional style. Magda Korsinsky’s landscape paintings are surface compositions that border on the abstract, comparable to the works that Nicolas de Staël created in the mid-20th century. As one of the few informal painters, he would always hold on to one subject, which he would make abstract in surface compositions to the point that it almost became unrecognisable. Thus he created a number of landscape paintings that are composed of large, monochrome surfaces. Magda Korsinsky takes a comparable approach in her landscape paintings of Ahrenshoop, bordering on free abstraction. Although her compositions are clearly rooted in the tradition of landscape painting, they are not painted. They are rather a patchwork of old clothing from Ahrenshoop and discarded textiles from hotels. Textiles play a central part in Magda Korsinsky’s work, especially second-hand textiles, which she might use to create a portrait of their former owner, for example. The material lends authenticity to the work. The textiles were used in the portrayed landscape or worn by the person portrayed. The second-hand textiles from the portrayed landscape convey, in their own way, something about the lives of the people who live there. As clothing is naturally decoded, the viewer not only creates the landscape composition, but also an image of a person who is, for example, wearing material with a leopard skin pattern on it or of a bed that was covered with yellow striped bed linen. Everyone has so much experience with textiles that the material and patterns immediately trigger associations. This information completes the image of the landscape in an exciting way and turns it into a cultural landscape.