Winter: Still Life

The Book of Hours as Transitional Object

When mother and child leave the stratified space between landscape and still life, the space that remains folds in on itself, into genre, and continues to divide from there. In doing so, they leave the painting behind like two halves of a sandwich—only with the topping missing in the middle. From then on, this topping, or rather these topoi, will accompany painting as an absence, an absence that will be replaced by ever new substitutes. For example, conflicts of content.

But first, still life. When media appear obsolete, they transform into their own drag version: in recognizing its limitations, each finally becomes aware of itself. Becoming self-aware here means becoming your own problem. Unable to believe in your former significance, you fail to be what you are and become what you always wanted to be: your other.

When books become printed matter, they dream of rising from the table, shaking off the scattered petals they had just so laboriously draped over themselves. They would rather become the whole plant, a curtain, topologies, thresholds. The false dragonflies should settle down, so real do the hallucinated blossoms want to be. They want to be all of these things at once, that is, to be painting. Painting, in turn, wants to end its own chapter as quickly as possible right at the beginning, turn the page on itself and move on. So it paints its own reverse, an anti-image, a screen. Something always has to protrude, get away. “The still life is a fringed edge that has gone wild, that has become independent, that has conquered the entire space of representation,” as Bernhard Siegert and Helga Lutz call it.

The days pass as we perform our daily lives, like turning the pages of a book of hours that has lost its meaning, but whose emptied rhythms we continue to unconsciously carry on. Or not. In the empty cathedrals of what remains sacred to us, WINTER becomes SPRING becomes SUMMER becomes AUTUMN—while the ruins of reality are within and all around. Mise en abyme … what is that actually, the painted abyss of painting? What is repeated again and again in painting, revealed in the process of change, and what is hidden through it (through hegemonies and clichés …), made unconscious, ‘naturalized’? The artificial flowers frame the abyss of images we project or receive. I want to drown your images of the present in the flowers of the past.
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There are texts that make you look at images differently: “Metamorphosen der Fläche” (2011) by Bernhard Siegert and Helga Lutz is one such text; Victor Stoichita’s “The Self-Aware Image” (1993) another. Both describe this initial self-problematization of images as an open space of negotiation (of contradictions). We want to explore this and ask in what form it appears today, or rather, what can still be made productive from it. In short, how the old problem (the primal fantasy of painting) could speak to us, still. A question we begin to ask with this first exhibition, “WINTER: Still Life”, and which we will continue to explore in four stages throughout the year. The next being “SPRING: Imperial Landscapes”.

Participating artists: Raihana Akbary, Sophia Balog, Hanna Berrio, nathan c’ha, Franky Daubenfeld, Ela Deniz Demir, Gregor Divizenz, Somebody Foushku, Isabelle Gray, Deniz Amber Kinir, Anne Kleinjan, Luise Knecht, Daniela Kuich, Chattip Metchanun, Kimia Nazari, Neva Eda Özkan, Emil Puchner, Laurin Schuh, Evgeny Tantsurin

An exhibition by the Painting department, hallucinated and illuminated by Henning Bohl and Florian Pfaffenberger.

Many thanks to the MQ, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Institute of Fine Arts and Media Arts, and all of the Painting department’s students and staff.