Linda Hnatovic’s work explores psychological and spatial states of transition, as well as the processes through which perception, memory, and identity are shaped. In her paintings and works on paper, she examines questions of belonging, alienation, and self-perception, focusing on moments when familiar structures begin to destabilize.

Her works originate in staged photographic scenes that are digitally manipulated and translated into painterly compositions. Through reflections, shifts in perspective, fragmentation, and spatial disruptions, she creates pictorial spaces that oscillate between reality and construction, resisting any single, definitive reading.

A recurring element in her work is an emerald-green ground that remains visible as a distinct layer, connecting different bodies of work. The green functions simultaneously as a spatial structure, an atmospheric carrier, and a trace of transformation.

In her more recent bodies of work, Hnatovic has increasingly turned her attention to affective states of the present. Exhaustion, passivity, emotional overwhelm, and forms of inertia take center stage—states situated between adaptation and protest, action and stasis. Her works examine how social tensions become inscribed in individual experience and manifest themselves in gestures, bodily postures, and spatial constellations.

Linda Hnatovic, born in Vienna in 1984, currently lives and works in Vienna. An artist with Slovak roots whose practice has been shaped by extended periods spent in different cultural contexts, she explores the complex relationships between identity, memory, and belonging. She studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, graduating in 2011 from Erwin Wurm’s class.