Michaela Frühwirth
Kunstverein Salzburg, Salzburg, Germany
Michaela Frühwirth, 'Latitude', installation view, photo: Andrew Phelps
Michael Frühwirth’s first solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Salzburg, entitled ‘Latitude’, is a lesson in the relativity of perception. Comprising two large-scale drawings and an architectural alteration, the show reminds the viewer of the fact that both the act of making and viewing an image are fundamentally bodily experiences.
‘Latitude’, installation view, photo: Andrew Phelps
Approaching the gallery, the first thing you notice is the extension of its entrance portal in the form of a corridor that leads directly onto the room’s only window. Once entered, the visitor’s gaze is therefore not immediately directed at art works but guided along the converging lines of the corridor, towards an exterior view. This intervention plays on the topos of the picture as a ‘window on to the world’ with a single-point perspective that reduces the body of the viewer to a single viewpoint. Just before the end of the corridor, however, the space opens sideways in either direction, and a very different take on the relationship between observer and observed is introduced. The corridor bisects the space forming two unequal chambers, each housing a drawing, and, wedged between the corridor and the window without the option for an overview, the visitor has to make a choice as to which space to enter, which work to look at.
Obstruction (2006), detail, photo: Willem Vermaase
In the smaller chamber, Obstruction (2006) is a two-part pencil drawing on translucent paper, featuring a stone field that was the result of a landslide. Every edge, every fracture, every crack of each rock or stone that broke lose and came to a grinding halt is drawn in such detail that the eye gets lost following the countless lines of graphite. What is missing in the picture is any indication of its context: there is no slope, plane, or, for that matter, horizon – no perspective at all. Based on a combination of different photographic views of the same location, Obstruction does not aim to accurately depict its visual reference, but aims to convey the discovery that looking at any one thing intently does not necessarily lead to a fuller and more inclusive grasp of its presence. Rather, it leads to the perceptual disintegration of unity, the breakdown of intelligible form. Since the outer wall of the corridor prevents standing at any distance from the large-scale drawing, the viewer is subject to a pictorial world of incommensurable detail, a space without foothold or air.
Sermilik Station (2009), detail, photo: Raviv Ganchrow
On the other side of the corridor, Sermilik Station (2009), another diptych drawing, demonstrates yet another way of unsettling the notion of a secure viewpoint as well as a centred and stable subjectivity. Again derived from a photographic assemblage, the work depicts both the front and side view of a glaciology research station in Greenland – the former at a ninety-degree angle, the latter upside down. In contrast to Obstruction, the motif has not been rendered by means of outlining each and every detail of the site. Instead, the two structures, including all the details that are research-related, have been translated into countless strokes of graphite. The only information left is the changing direction and dimension of pencil movements, which, altogether, form a metallic surface that catches the light and dimly reflects the presence of the viewer, who is forced to keep moving in order to experience the work in its entirety. In Sermilik Station as well, fixation makes way for disintegration and any attempt at stabilizing perception only sets the world in motion.
‘Latitude’, installation view, photo: Raviv Ganchrow
Frühwirth’s drawings are about ‘remaking’ the object of perception – as opposed to remaking the way it looks. Her drawing line is not descriptive or figurative but testifies to an experience the viewer is invited to recreate in the process of looking. At the Kunstverein Salzburg, the artist succeeds in creating an architectural setting that supports the experiential dimension of her work, which, at first sight, might come across as primarily conceptual. At its core, however, is the insight that the optical and the physical are not dialectical. Just like the sense of touch – reciprocal by definition – vision, in Frühwirth’s work, is resistive.
Manuela Ammer
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