Brigitte Kowanz

The Austrian artist Brigitte Kowanz (1957-2022) made light her primary artistic medium. She continuously examined its different qualities and manifestations via objects, installations, and spatial interventions using various illuminants. The medium of light is made tangible and treated as an independent phenomenon, material, and information carrier, as well as a metaphor for a search for new forms of representation of visible reality. Kowanz combines language – for instance political statements and news transmissions – with formal aesthetics, illustrating that light is not just a neutral vehicle for information, but plays a decisive role in shaping it.

Kowanz was awarded the Großer Österreichischder Staatspreis (Grand Austrian State Prize) in 2009 and exhibited at the Austrian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). She has held a professorship at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 1997-2021. In July 2025, the retrospective Light Is What We See by the artist will open at the ALBERTINA in Vienna. Further selected solo exhibitions have taken place in Schlossmuseum Linz (2022), Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2020), Taxispalais, Innsbruck (2011), and the Museum of Modern Art Foundation Ludwig, Vienna (2010).

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