Susanna Lakner

Stranded
6.2″x8.6″; vintage books and magazine pages on cardboard; 2021

Susanna Lakner
Stuttgart, Germany

STATEMENT

I’m not searching for materials, I just find them. I’m not a collector, I cut out what I find, keep it up. The details find each other. Always. Sometimes immediately, sometimes years later.

“It may be through contrasts and antitheses that Susanna Lakner’s image-building techniques can best be characterized. Generous clarity and meticulousness; free playfulness and discipline; rich emotions and decent ironies; bewildering leaps and accuracy to the millimeter; a disarming plurality of thought and material as opposed to inexorable coherence. And on top of all that, despite the infinite thematic variety and the choice of material from age-old paper antiquities through today’s newspapers, as well as the incredible divergence of formats and approaches, the end result is invariably an unmistakable Lakner collage. And in it, evidently, in a self-explanatory manner, everything has fallen into its right place. Next, we see it along all other sheets, cards, fold-outs, boxes, notebooks, and books rise to a custom sector in Planet Susannia, a universe built upon consistency coupled with freedom, where an impressive and beautiful entirety is becoming more and more complete in spite of its inherent unfinishability.”
–Ervin Zsubori, Képírás Art Magazine, 2016

BIO

Susanna Lakner was born and grew up in Hungary and has been living in Stuttgart, Germany since 1989. She studied typography and worked for many years in the printing industry.

As a collagist, she prefers the cut-and-paste technique. She makes found object assemblages and artist books. Her works and publications can be found in several public and private collections in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the USA. As Planet Susannia, she has been known as a mail artist since 1995 and as the founder/editor of the mail art assembling magazine 22, which ran for fifty-one issues, with original works by internationally-known mail artists, until 2017.

Since 2011, her collage zines and books have been published by Tonerworks (USA), Artemisz (Hungary), and Redfoxpress (Ireland). Her current collage book, Universalraum / Universal Space published by Moloko Plus in Germany, is about a universal space, where everything can be visible simultaneously. Persons from the past meet with persons in the present.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.leben-und-kleben.blogspot.com

IMAGES

The City
6.2″x10.2″; vintage books and magazine pages on cardboard; 2021
The Time Investigator
6.2″x7.8″; vintage books and magazine pages on cardboard; 2021
Through the Lens
7.4″x11.6″; vintage books and magazine pages on cardboard; 2021
Worldgarden
6.2″x9.8″; vintage books and magazine pages on cardboard; 2021