"Die Zeichnungen entfalten Bildräume, die sich einer eindeutigen Bestimmung entziehen und den Betrachter auffordern, aus der Kontingenz der Linien Formen und Strukturen herauszulesen. Teilweise lässt sich gar Schriftähnliches erkennen, sodass die Zeichnung zwischen Darstellung und Zeichenhaftigkeit changiert, ohne sich festlegen zu lassen… Mahlknechts Bilder spiegeln einen Prozess der Bezeichnung wieder, der sein Bezeichnetes stets "verfehlt", wodurch das eigentliche Signifikat der Zeichnung sich in einen Raum der Unbestimmtheit verschiebt." (David Komary 2011)

"... The drawings reveal pictorial spaces that evade any unambiguous interpretation, challenging the beholder to discern forms and structures within the contingency of the lines. At times it is even possible to perceive something resembling writing, so that the drawing oscillates between pictorial representation and calligraphy without ever settling on one or the other. The possibility of interconnection always seems to be the Mahlknecht’s chief graphic intention. The artist ›creates‹ maps of imaginary pictorial spaces which contain a latent reference to the external world. She portrays vague and indeterminate topographies in which spatial tectonics appears not to apply. Differing spatial locations are interlaced, the categories of above/ below and in front of/behind threaten to turn into their opposite or to dissolve completely. Viewers lose their orientation in these expanding pictorial spaces and are forced to rely on their own ›reading‹ without being able to fall back on familiar experience. The gaze alternates between an orbital, cartographic perspective and an increased ground visibility, looking both down at and into the imaginary landscape. In opposition to the cartographic mechanism - the exertion of visual control via directing the gaze – Mahlknecht offers a view of endless distances, which comes close to transcending space altogether. She enables ›an airy, Icarian view that examines a world cosmically freed of the power of gravity‹. ... The artist’s drawings move between the remembered and the imaginary without strictly delimiting the boundary between these categories or allowing them to merge. Rather, this determined indeterminacy keeps the mode of representation in constant movement. The process of drawing thereby becomes the analogue path of ›aesthetic thinking‹, it manifests itself as a process of seeking which is not orientated towards results but rather the continuation of the aesthetic process. The drawing is revealed as a medium of temporalisation, as a reference to its own state of being in the process of becoming. Mahlknecht’s drawings appear as excerpts from a continuum of pictorial space which is only partially made concrete in individual pictures. These form temporal syntheses in which the origin and future of the lines are mutually entangled. Mahlknecht’s drawings reflect a process of depiction which constantly ›fails‹ to capture the thing depicted, thereby displacing the drawing’s actual significate into indeterminate space." (David Komary 2011)