by default | brigitte kowanz and kristina nagel
by default highlights works by Brigitte Kowanz and Kristina Nagel that explore the relationship between visible appearance and hidden presence. Aftereffects and latencies shape images in which something is already inherent without being immediately recognizable. Signs and physical impressions do not appear as complete forms, but rather as carriers of information and experiences that only gradually reveal themselves. For both artists, such intermediate states arise through processes of transference, repetition, and material transformation.
In her photographic work, Kristina Nagel (Frankfurt am Main, DE) develops an autonomous visual language at the intersection of physicality, materiality, and form. Leather serves as a constant point of reference in her work and, in her current series, becomes the material memory of physical presence. The traces inscribed within it increasingly detach themselves from individual physical attribution and develop a visual quality of their own. The new works transform these traces into an independent formal order in which surface, structure, and abstraction enter into new relationships with one another. The receding of the individual is not to be understood as an absence, but rather as the unleashing of an artistic potential that points beyond the physical reference.
In the work of Brigitte Kowanz (1957–2022, Vienna), light, language, and information are transformed into new forms of apperance through reflections, repetitions, and codings. Mirrored surfaces expand and multiply a starting point until the origin and its manifestation can no longer be clearly distinguished from one another. Neon lettering directly connects language with light and transforms symbols into visual and spatial structures. Information becomes visible without necessarily being immediately legible. Between material construction and immaterial appearance, spaces open up in which meaning is not fixed but unfolds only through the interplay of the work, its surroundings, and the viewer’s perception.
In by default, In the works of Kowanz and Nagel focus on what remains perceptible between the original impulse and the afterimage, exploring states in which the past continues to exist in a transformed form. In Nagel’s photographs, the effects on the material persist even after the body has disappeared, while Kowanz continuously alters light and information through reflection and coding.
opening
tuesday 17 november
6 – 9 pm
