Svenja Deininger: Echo of a Mirror Fragment / Gabriel Sierra: The First Impressions of the Year 2018 (During the early days of the year 2017) / Angelika Loderer

Svenja Deininger
Echo of a Mirror Fragment

Svenja Deininger regards painting as a process: she does not consider her pictures, on which she often works over long periods of time, to be self-contained entities. It is, rather, that the process of creating an image serves to stimulate reflection and acts as a mental continuation of a form or composition—the imagining of the future picture and how it is located in a spatial context are thus essential elements of the artistic process. As if working on a text the artist elaborates and polishes the syntax of her art. She considers her works to be parts of a system that require their interrelations to be analysed whenever they encounter one another.

Her idiosyncratic pictorial composition and the specific way in which the painting is designed layer by layer is characteristic of her works, which balance between abstraction and a figuration that is—at least—hinted at. This method of working corresponds to Deininger’s interest in suggesting spaciality on the flat canvas or asserting a certain materiality that is poised between becoming concrete and remaining indefinite. While the painting support is made an issue the canvas itself becomes a compositional instrument and the colour and character of the fabric assume the function of design elements. By means of combining large and small format pictures and positioning them in a space she creates a tension, which, together with her range of shapes, results in a "Deiningerian idiom." With Echo of a Mirror Fragment, Svenja Deininger will present a number of new paintings especially designed for the exhibition as well as an artist book.

Svenja Deininger, born in 1974 in Vienna, lives and works in Vienna.

Curated by Jeanette Pacher

Gabriel Sierra
The First Impressions of the Year 2018 (During the early days of the year 2017)

The work of Gabriel Sierra emerges as a process that can be associated with abstract notions of perception and communication between humans and their built environment. It represents basic experiences and explores the functions of physical space and the human body, commenting on the problem of how we build using forms, shapes, and materials and how what we build influences our behavior in turn.

Employing a variety of geometry-based strategies involving objects, structures, spatial constructions, and other elements, Sierra uses the context of the exhibition to experiment with ordinary situations and their presentation. For example, in Before Present, his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, he repeated the same room three times to instill a sense of déjà-vu in the visitors. At the Renaissance Society, he changed the exhibition’s title every hour to mark the exact moment a visitor entered the gallery. In Thus Far at Peep-Hole, he divided the installation into areas that were open to visitors on different days of the week; to see the entire exhibition, visitors had to visit it on four different days.

Sierra’s work has been presented at Kunsthalle Zürich, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Sculpture Center, New York (2015); the 2013 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and Peep-Hole, Milan (2013); and at CAC Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge (2006).

Gabriel Sierra, born in 1975 in San Juan Nepomuceno, Bolívar (Colombia), lives and works in Bogotá.

Curated by Bettina Störr

Angelika Loderer

One might classify Angelika Loderer’s work as media reflexive sculptures in as far as the artist allows the characteristics of the material she uses and the work processes themselves to feed into the design process as fundamental parameters. Her sculptures are frequently made of cast metal or consist of secondary material from the area of metal casting—wax, for example, or special mould sand which, because of its high level of form stability, is particularly well-suited for casting. It is essential for the production of the mould but it leaves no traces on the finished product and so is invisible. Loderer elevates this auxiliary aid to her medium and builds fragile, temporary sculptures which, due to their character as mould sand, make allusions to metal while simultaneously setting up an exciting and paradoxical dialogue between the enduring nature of the one and the ephemerality of the other.

The unselfconscious and experimental way of dealing with material is characteristic of Loderer’s work method: unusual combinations of material generate exciting objects that sometimes suggest "performative sculptures" as, for example, where a mattress which has been stamped into moulding sand slowly liberates itself from its bonds and breaks the form or when bundles of hay covered in plaster wilt during an exhibition leaving only its previous exterior shape like a snakeskin that has been shed.

Loderer’s sculptures stand witness to the ambivalence between current snapshot and durability, between value, impermanence and meaning: she also questions the ascription of values by ennobling simple, commonplace forms by means of valuable materials.

Angelika Loderer, born in 1984 in Feldbach (Styria), lives and works in Vienna.

Curated by Bettina Spörr

Press conference: January 31, 11am
For interview requests and any other questions please contact: susanne.fernandes-silva@secession.at
Please find the press releases and images for download here from January 31, 2017.