The "Körperwandlungen" exhibition at the Mattersburg Cultural Center opens up a space in which the visible is set in motion and the familiar wants to be viewed anew. The photographer and multidisciplinary artist Christina Lag-Schröckenstein devotes herself to a subject that is rarely treated with such delicacy and unconditional clarity: the beauty of ageing. Not as a nostalgic retrospective, but as an aesthetic transformation, as a process that does not diminish the body, but expands it.
Lag-Schröckenstein's works are resolutely opposed to an ideal of beauty that makes youth the benchmark and physicality a commodity. The artist breaks with the logic of normative views that force female bodies in particular into narrow grids. Her pictorial worlds, on the other hand, show a femininity in flux, a physicality that transforms itself, allows itself to shed its skin, bears traces - and precisely because of this unfolds its own unmistakable power.
Body transformations © Christina Lag-Schröckenstein
The artist's gaze is both exploratory and deeply connected. Inspired by the metamorphoses of Greek mythology, Lag-Schröckenstein interweaves the human, the vegetable and the animal to create poetic figurations. The bodies of her models appear like beings between the spheres: rooted and growing, vulnerable and powerful, always in relation to their environment. The boundaries of the human dissolve in favor of a common, breathing continuum.
Her career is as diverse as her work. After studying classical guitar and jazz guitar at the MUK Vienna, a stay in New York led her to photography - a medium that she has been exploring with insistent precision and analog depth ever since. Since her return, Lag-Schröckenstein has lived and worked in Burgenland, whose landscape and tranquillity have become an important resonance chamber for her artistic work. The exhibition shows works that are located at the interface of photography, painting, installation and soundscape. It is always about exploring transitions: between body and nature, surface and memory, identity and change. "Körperwandlungen" is therefore much more than a photographic series - it is an invitation to renegotiate beauty and expand one's own perception.
December 3, 2025 to January 10, 2026, Cultural Center Mattersburg
www.kulturzentren.at/kulturzentren/kulturzentrum-mattersburg
