Dorle Lindner is a self-taught artist born in wartime Berlin whose illustrations, largely in the realms of magic and fantasy, represent a vibrant form of Outsider Art. Although she briefly attended art school in Munich she soon left and taught herself to engrave on scratchboards – white cardboard with a hard black veneer of lustrous china clay through which the artist cuts images. She spent some time in New York in 1967, meeting photojournalist and friend of Picasso David Douglas Duncan. Duncan showed her work to Picasso who said “she has her own world too”.
Duncan’s 1978 book ‘The Magic Worlds of Fantasy’ saw Lindner’s work published alongside that of three other artists and ran to five editions. In it Lindner, who moved to London in 1968, said “I live and work in a frame … I think it is night. Everything and nothing influences me… My world is my own.” She said her work involved engraving images of another world, which she visited in outer space.
A rather glamorous 1967 photograph of Lindner by Duncan is in the University of Texas collection, along with scratchboard engravings given to Duncan by Lindner. Hauser & Wirth exhibited in Gstaad in 2020 Duncan’s photographs of Picasso alongside work by Picasso. Lindner, who in later life generally paints abstract oils, has made little attempt to sell or publicise her art but in 2019 Miaja Gallery in Singapore put on a major solo exhibition of her work.
‘What comes out of the pot’‘Trump politics bullshit’untitled‘(some) Education’ or ‘the keen student’Phantasia series‘Dornroschen’s dinner -party’
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