With the exhibition 'From sublime spaces: The apartment', she continues a complex of works that aim to combine spaces and spatial constructions with the concept of the sublime. For this piece, the artist uses her own domestic environment: living space becomes the stage for a utopian version of reality. One room of her apartment is reduced to the absolute minimum and all traces of color are eliminated
With her exhibition "From sublime spaces: The apartment", Wiebke Maria Wachmann continues a complex of works that aim to combine spaces and spatial constructions with the concept of the sublime. For this piece, the artist uses her own domestic environment: living space becomes the stage for a utopian version of reality.
One room of her apartment is reduced to the absolute minimum, all traces of color
eliminated, everything completely covered in white: the floor, the ceiling, the walls,
and the furniture. The outlines of the room and the objects it contains, the structures
and surfaces, are modified and adapted in such a way that everything merges. Objects
and pieces of furniture look like heavily simplified copies of themselves. Concrete
three-dimensionality comes across as a flat picture, reality and painting intermingle.
Unnaturally bright light (2.5 KW HMI floodlight mounted on the balcony outside)
penetrates this supposed wall of fog. The outlines of the space are blurred, concrete
spatial references are wiped out by the glare, leaving behind a peculiar, theatrical
atmosphere. One can no longer tell if this is just extremely bright sunshine, or if some
supernatural light source is responsible.
In this way, reality becomes intangible, the triviality of the everyday is blotted out. The
scene appears as if frozen in motion. The furniture and other shapes take on an abstract,
shadowy aspect, shifting between transparency and opacity.
The resulting impression of
the immediate surroundings is both real and unreal at the same time, the abstract content
merges with the objects, which are real nonetheless. This generates forms and moments
of limitlessness and totality. The real environment is dematerialized and the sublime is
evoked where it is least expected: in the everyday.
At the same time, this mise en scène reports back from the collective reservoir of our
desires and fears. For several weeks, it will provide a backdrop for large-format photographs
that will be on show in the gallery.
The photographs create places that cannot be entered physically, only in the viewer's
imagination. The auratic, suggestive presence of the pictures employs contemporary
means and media in its search for an imaginary world of the absolute, the disturbing and
the beautiful - as a way of transporting the concept of the sublime into the present.
Opening: Saturday, 05th. of March, at 6 p.m.
This exhibition takes place with the kind support of Osram.
Galerie rekord
D-10119 Berlin, Brunnenstraße 162
Tuesday - Saturday 12 – 18 h & by prior arrangement