Eva Schlegel Kunst Edition (Art Prints)

Unser Weltbild ist von den Bildnormen der Medien und sozialen Netzwerke geprägt. Deshalb mag es uns als die einzige Form erscheinen, in der wir die Welt wahrnehmen können, doch Eva Schlegels Kunst belehrt uns eines besseren. In ihrem ganzen Oeuvre fungiert das Unscharfe als Vektor, mit dem die Fixiertheit des Bildes von Grund auf transformiert und entfesselt wird, um so den Bereich des Verstehens zu erweitern. In
dieser Hinsicht gemahnt uns Schlegels Kunst an eine Frage von Octavio Paz: „Worauf richtet sich der Fokus, und wer darf behaupten, was ein legitimer Fokus ist?"

Eva Schlegel

1960, born in Hall / Tirol (Austria)

Lives and works in Vienna (Austria) 

Eva Schlegel's work includes photographs, objects, and installations concerned with the interaction of objects and perception, especially with the contradictions and ruptures that frequently occur in this relationship. In many of her works, meaning is constructed by consciously mobilizing the potential of associations and fathoming its depth. Her engagement with concealing and revealing, disclosure and discovery, investigates structures of desire and legibility immanent to the image. Schlegel’s curious, mesmerizing artworks encourage us to question the intellectual limits we possess in overcoming unclassified conditions of existence and perception. Her enquiries hover between the dull and deathly weight of lead and those ultra-fine drops of condensation that create clouds like consciousness, changing from one moment to the next. 

Eva Schlegel studied art in Vienna at the University of Applied Art. From 1997 to 2006, she held a Professorship of art and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 2011, Eva Schlegel was the Commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Eva Schlegel’s works were exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and 1995, at the Sydney Biennial in 1988 and 1992. She participated in the Kochin Muziris Biennale in 2017. She has had solo and group exhibitions at the Albertina and Albertina Modernand the Belvedere in 2021, the LACMA Los Angeles 2021, the Oklahoma Contemporary 2020, the Ferenczy Museum, Hungary 2019 the Kunstforum, Vienna 2019, the Kunsthalle Krems, Austria 2018, the Belvedere Winterpalais, Vienna, 2015, the Museum of modern Art, Vienna, the 15. Bienal Internacional de Arquitectura de Buenos Aires 2015, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2021, 2014 no mans heaven, MAMM, Moscow;at ESA, Nordwijk,  the MAK, Museum for Applied Arts, Vienna 2010, the Secession, Vienna, 2005. Selection of permanent interventions: Floating gates open world, Cape 10, Vienna 2021, Johannes Kepler University, 2021, untitled. (veiled) Libelle, MQ, Vienna 2020, all around the world…, Ringshospitalet, Copenhaben 2020, Cloudspace, Museum Liaunig, 2019, Novartis Basel, Walkway, 2007 and many more.  

Our view of the world is habitually defined through the highly defined images we encounter in the media and the social network. here as an excess of language, a hidden resource which enables us to shift form one paradigm to another"

Once within the building, the sense of visual disorientation deepens, and a new visual realm begins to unfold for the viewer. By blurring the images of women who appear to have been sourced from fashion magazines, one ceases to look at the clothing, and focusses instead on the pose, the gesture at hand. Indeed, the blur forces the eye into a new form of analysis and questions what focus stands for. Similarly, the enigmatic Vermeer-esque allure of the photographs of window-opening women is accentuated

through their decomposition. Printed on various suspended curtains, they are delicately suspended in “enfilade” formation, embarking the viewer on a balletic gaze whereby the eye pirouettes rhythmically across the“opened windows” within the building. If painting was traditionally conceived as a window upon the world, Eva Schlegel’s technique of multiplication affirms the need for a heterogenous,

unhinged visual stand-point. How poignant therefore that the structure of the“enfilade” should have been characteristic of Barroque architecture, and that in turn the Barroque with its surge for an impure multiplicity of experience should be considered by cultural theorists such as Stephen Toulmin as a stimulating model from which to challenge the self-proclaimed purified, self-contained, homogeneity of Modernism.

The blurred image has a trajectory that has accompanied the development of photography since its inception; from the effects produced by technical inability to photography’s efforts to capture physical or emotional movement as well as its more recent use as an intentional critical resource. The notion of movement within the image was a key question in analogue photography of the late 19th century. This is the case. This may appear like a normal way by which we can comprehend the world around us, yet Schlegel’s practice tells us otherwise. She has developed a large body of work in which the blur operates as a vector to fundamentally transform and unbind the fixedness of the image and enlarge the field of its comprehension.

In so doing her practice recalls Octavio Paz’s question “what is focus, and who has the right to say what a legitimate focus is?”1. “No Man’s Heaven”, aside from the video installation discussed previously,

presents three further bodies of work: portraits of women in various poses, reminiscent of fashion magazines; various photographs of women opening a window; and poems and theatre texts specially selected by the artist or commissioned for the project. All of these images are blurred; indeed they appear to have been filtered through the long distance lens of a myopic eye. In so doing Eva Schlegel’s mounts a concerted attack upon the fixity of the image and the stability of its meaning.

However blurred the images may be, Eva Schlegel is exacting about their spatial positioning within the Salzburger Festspielhaus hosting the work. The poems and theatre extracts, printed upon the exterior windows that span the building’s façade, greet the visitor as they walk towards and enter it. Habituated to elaborate signage systems directing one's de-ambulation through any cultural event

the viewer will however enter the building with an incipient sense of perplexity buzzing with questions regarding one’s visual inability as well as the artist’s technical failure. None of these questions are relevant however, and it is in Bifo Berardi’s recent suggestion that poetry can operate as an excessive form of language to catalyse a fluidity of meaning, that one finds greater intellectual conviction.

Berardi remarks, “Poetry is the language of non-exchangeability, the return of infinite hermeneutics, and the return of the sensuous body of language. I’m talking about poetry.

Katya Garc ía-Antón 2013. No man's heaven (Eva Schlegel - Salzburger Festspiele Buch).

Eva Schlegels verschwommene  Kunst Schriften sind als permanente Installationen sehr bekannt und wurden unter Anderem hier angebracht:  Sammlung Essl, der Novartis Walk in Basel, das Neue Institutsgebäude in Wien (Universität), das Tiroler Landesmuseum (Ferdinandeum), die Kunsthalle Krems(Universität Bozen), KFZ Zulassungsstelle München, Porschehof Salzburg,

MAK – Gegenwartskunst Depot, eine Volksbank, das Museum der Moderne (Salzburg, die Galleri Bo Bjerggaard und im Gebäude der Kommunalkredit Wien.

Eva Schlegel, studierte von 1979 bis 1985 an der Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien und war von 1997

bis 2006 Professorin für Kunst und Fotografie an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Wien.

2011 war Eva Schlegel Kommissärin des Österreichischen Pavilions der Biennale in Venedig, 1995 war sie bereits als

Künstlerin dort vertreten. Eva Schlegels Arbeiten waren 1988 und 1992 auf der Sidney Biennale, auf der 15.

Bienal Internacional de Arquitectura de Buenos Aires 2015, Photobiennale MAM Moskau 2014 und 2017 im

Rahmen der Kochin Muziris Biennale, Indien zu sehen. Ihre Werke waren in Einzel- und

Gruppenausstellungen zu sehen, u.a. Albertina Modern, Wien 2021, LACMA Los Angeles 2021, dem

Oklahoma Contemporary 2020, Ferenczy Museum, Ungarn 2019, Kunstforum Wien 2019, Kunsthalle Krems

2018, Belvedere Winterpalais, Wien 2015, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 2013, MAK, Museum für

Angewandte Kunst, Wien 2010 und Secession, Wien 2005 zu sehen. Seit 1987 zeigte die Galerie Krinzinger

Eva Schlegels Arbeiten in zahlreichen Einzel- und Gruppenausstellungen, darunter curated_by Jannis

Varelas, Krinzinger Schottenfeld, Wien 2021, Portrait. Marina Abramovic, Martha Jungwirth, Eva Schlegel.

Galerie Krinzinger, Wien 2019, Imaginary Spaces Galerie Krinzinger, Wien (solo) 2017, Curated by Verkauf

in Nebenräumen / Sales in the Side Rooms kuratiert von Harald Falckenberg, Krinzinger Projekte, Wien 2015,

Charakters and Figures, Galerie Krinzinger, Wien (solo) 2015, Galerie Krinzinger, Wien (solo) 2010. Auswahl

an permanenten Interventionen: Floating gates open world, Cape 10, Wien 2021, Johannes Kepler Universität

2021, untitled. (veiled) Libelle, MQ, Wien 2020, all around the world..., Ringshospitalet, Kopenhagen 2020,

Cloudspace, Fa. Wild Völkermarkt 2019, Novartis Basel, Walkway, 2007.