Elena Narbutaitė: Light / Inge Grognard: Eyes / Roman Ondak: Resistance

Grazer Kunstverein presents Light, Eyes, and Resistance – two exhibitions and a performance unfolding during their openings.
 

Light
Light is a retrospective tracing Elena Narbutaitė’s engagement with lasers and LEDs, presenting works from 2013 to today.

Laser and LED are two distinct forms of light, each with their own rhythm and resonance. A laser’s beam is a sharpened line, its waves perfectly in phase – a coherence that gives it the power to cut, measure, and guide. The LED, by contrast, is an unfolding glow, its photons out of step, its wavelengths blending into a spectrum that shifts and scatters. One involves focused precision, the other a dispersed field of color. Both are familiar from situations as diverse as the vibrant pulse of a party, the lethal targeting of warfare, the beam that holds an electronic door ajar, or the silent transfer of data. Narbutaitė reconfigures these ubiquitous associations, reimagining the cold accuracy of industrial lasers and the ambient shifting hues of LEDs into something unbound.

Fabricating intimacy and disquiet with exacting attention, Narbutaitė orchestrates moments in which light becomes an event – most visible when it collides with a surface, materializing as a cut in space or imbuing it with deep feeling. The beams do not merely illuminate; they shapeshift, slicing through the air with an intensity that unsettles as much as it mesmerizes, their degree of visibility changing as the brightness of the day dictates.

Light is a meditation on its own double binds – how it dazzles and guides, divides and connects. To discern is to see and not see at the same time – to be blinded by clarity, to lose oneself in the sharp edge of illumination. It overwhelms even as it reveals, a paradox of vision and obscurity. In bending light, Narbutaitė gives structure to such feelings.
 

Eyes
Eyes is an exhibition featuring seven large-scale billboards across the city of Graz, each presenting a composition of eye makeup by Inge Grognard, the pioneering Belgian makeup artist whose work has shaped avant-garde fashion for decades. Captured by Grognard herself backstage during runway preparations and fashion shoots, these images focus exclusively on the eye, omitting all other defining elements such as clothing, hair, scenography, and accessories. This approach highlights the eye as an isolated subject, emphasizing it as a site of composition, color, and texture, while retaining its capacity to convey emotion and depth. Grognard is known for her raw, unconventional approach to makeup, often exploring distortion, asymmetry, and non-traditional materials. Eyes highlights these motifs by transferring them within the wider urban environment, inviting passersby to engage with makeup not as mere embellishment, but as a potent act of composition – one that reclaims it as a site of agency and unruliness.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication featuring photographs by Grognard documenting her makeup work. It is edited by Tom Engels and Julie Peeters and published by Grazer Kunstverein.
 

Resistance
Roman Ondak’s performance Resistance will take place during the openings of Light and Eyes.

Light, Eyes, and Resistance are curated by Tom Engels.