Isabella Kohlhuber: Social Field

Isabella Kohlhuber’s artistic practice unfolds in the space between sign and thing, language and material, instruction and interpretation. Working across drawing, typography, sculpture, installation and site-specific intervention, she repeatedly turns systems that appear fixed and functional into open fields of reading. Her quasi-typographic “Bastards” hover between image and text bringing visual language of regulation directly into architectural space. Familiar floor marking systems become subtly estranged: a sign that normally organises movement and behaviour begins to question its own authority. Kohlhuber’s practice is attentive to these everyday structures—those unnoticed conventions through which spaces are ordered, bodies are guided, and social relations are negotiated.

With Social Field, this attention moves onto the sidewalk where art encounters an infrastructure already charged with purpose. A series of markings and graphics will enter into dialogue with the existing ‘taktil Bodenleitsysteme’ of raised parallel lines embedded in the pavement that function as a directional guide, allowing blind and visually impaired pedestrians to orient themselves through touch. While these markings may pass almost unnoticed by sighted passers-by, they constitute a precise and meaningful spatial language that is read through the body. Kohlhuber’s intervention introduces another layer of visual signs into this already encoded surface, creating a meeting between what is seen and what is felt, between the visible language of art and an infrastructure whose meaning is primarily accessed through touch.

Isa Kohlhuber: Recent Solo Exhibitions include 2024 Galerie Petra Seiser (Attersee) and Solo Stand Artissima (Torino, IT), Performance - Culture Capital of Europe, Bad Ischl (AT), 2023 Kaiservilla Bad Ischl (AT), Public Space Vienna, project »Mothering Communities«, 2022 Galleria Doris Ghetta (Ortisei, Süd Tirol IT) 2020 Galerie im Traklhaus (Salzburg), 2016 Galleria Doris Ghetta, (Milano)…