Antoinette

Solo exhibition “Second Nature” by Antoinette Zwirchmayr

2018

Volcanic landscapes are sites of deceptive composure. Seen as if sleeping, their latent gestures of alarming transformation haunt their surface as dangerous possibility. A naked man lies dormant, his body’s form echoed and cradled by the elegant, shadowed curves of the white terrain in dreamlike symbiosis. We are presented with an almost sculptural scene for serene contemplation – but on a volatile terrain that hints timelessness is a lie. Indoors, a woman’s form complements (or complicates) the man’s, around gracefully rounded architecture. It’s an erotically charged universe infused with mirroring intuition, yet distancing other-worldliness. Emanating from no less than fourteen 16mm projectors, this imagery defies any linear, simplifying ordering principle. It’s fitting, then, that the exhibition’s title “SECOND NATURE” brings into question not only acquired traits – those habits of looking, perhaps, that reduce the irreducible – but also suggests an inter-connected, associative universe teeming with double meanings. Antoinette Zwirchmayr’s filmic work calls forth a realm of seductive allure only to complicate it with inexplicable strangeness and irreducible ambiguity. The Salzburg-born artist often arranges the human body in landscapes and with objects in a manner that carries undeniable erotic charge, even as it defamiliarises and obscures it from a sense of knowability. Her use of analog film reinforces an attraction to the contradictory zones of physicality and transience, the evidential and the chimerical. (Text Carmen Gray, Theorist in Residence)

An article worth reading about this exhibition can be found online here.

// http://www.antoinettezwirchmayr.com //

Opening pfotos (c) eSeL.at – Lorenz Seidler

// https://w.dasweissehaus.at/en/exhibition/einzelausstellung-antoinette-zwirchmayr/ //