Fieber at Galerie Emanuel Layr

Artists: Lena Henke, Lisa Holzer, Margaret Raspé

Exhibition title: Fieber

Curated by: Kari Rittenbach

Venue: Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna, Austria

Date: September 9 – November 5, 2016

Photography: Georg Petermichl, all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna

Fieber, Fever

There is a small joke in this exhibition about a kind of illness in relation to the creative process. Maybe a passing morning sickness, or too-familiar body dysmorphia; a general sense radiating from some vestigial inner organ that all is not well. Anyway, it’s uncomfortable. But the coincident flashes of heat, heartache and mild anxiety won’t dissipate through wishful thinking alone. The fever must be allowed to run its course.

Because of the (modern) avant-garde desire to collapse art into the everyday, and the (now) terrifying encroachment of capital and the security state into all manner of social and biological life, it is impossible to think of one’s artistic or cultural origins without considering the physical and intellectual problem (pain, labor) of birth. Where does anything come from? Science, philosophy and religion have a number of conflicting theories, and certainly those proposed within art have remained, until recently, absurdly patriarchal. As Diedrich Diedrichsen has remarked, the strong grip of the canon over time exerts a deadly chokehold; resulting in conceptual still-births, aborted alternatives, malignant obedience to an empty formal code.

The series of works brought together in this three-man exhibition play with varying intensities of heat – through artistic processes that resist, or slip away from traditional categories. In (what appears to be) orthodox film, painting, and sculpture, (re)production is staged within the realm of base matter and banal fact; as it pertains to the body, at work.

Lisa Holzer’s newest “paintings” are thick with complex alimentary particles, in muted mush-tones that have been poured or pressed with the back of a soup-spoon against the artist’s worktop. Transparent and translucent drips on the glass surfaces of their standard frames seem to expel unmixed color and excess condensation, as if her fixed, allover compositions had continued to breathe, emote, and sweat.

Lena Henke’s latest sculptures from the series Female Fatigue (2015-16) reduce architectonic structures down to the supportive scale of the freestanding plinth. Thus diminished, the public museum and private interiors of Viennese architects Hans Hollein (Das Kuchenstück) and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (Die Frankfurter Küche) here house or prop up fragile sand impressions of Surrealist or neoclassical fixtures, and choice fragments of the singular ornament which graces every style, aesthetic, and period: the female form.

Margaret Raspé shot her first camera-helmet film after attaching a (then) lightweight Agfa Super 8 camcorder to an industrial hardhat. In a series of 30-second single takes (the limit of her device’s wind-up self-timer) she recorded the preparation of a Schweineschnitzel. All eight of the works in this series, made between 1971 and 1983, are presented looped across three monitors. In each tightly framed view, the “automatism” of her serial production – whether daily washing, cooking, drawing, or painting – is emphasized as proceeding from the very same pair of (knowing) hands.

–Kari Rittenbach

Lena Henke, My piece of cake, His piece of cake, 2016
Metal, sand, silicone, glazed ceramics, 90 x 90 x 70 cm

Lena Henke, My piece of cake, 2016
Metal, sand, silicone, glazed ceramics, 90 x 90 x 70 cm

Lena Henke, Female monster, 2016
Glazed ceramic, 24 x 21 x 23 cm

Margaret Raspé, Schweineschnitzel (Pork Schnitzel), 1971
Super 8 transferred to blu-ray, color, silent, 4 min

Margaret Raspé, Backe, backe Kuchen (Pat-a-Cake, Pat-a-Cake), 1972, Super 8 transferred to blu-ray, color, silent, 20 min

Margaret Raspé, Die Selbstbewegung des Grautomaten oder Schein bleibt Schein (The Auto-Moon of the Femachine, or Appearance ist Sll Appearance), 1977, Super 8 transferred to blu-ray, color, silent, 12 min

Lisa Holzer, Not yet titled, 2016
Pigment print on cotton paper, Crystal Clear 202/1, polyurethane and acrylic paint on glass, 110.3 x 86.3 cm

Lena Henke, Nie erlag ich seiner Persönlichkeit, 2016
Metal, sand, silicone, fibreglass, epoxy resin, rubber, 90 x 45 x 45 cm

Lisa Holzer, Not yet titled, 2016
Pigment print on cotton paper, Crystal Clear 202/1, polyurethane and acrylic paint on glass, 110.3 x 86.3 cm

Lena Henke, The fatal net, 2016
Glazed ceramic, 20 x 15.5 x 12 cm

Lena Henke, Enigma, 2016
Ceramic, 29 x 20.5 x 18 cm

Lena Henke, The red tower, 2016
Ceramic, 19.5 x 22.4 cm

Lena Henke, Ihre Spülküche, 2016
Metal, sand, silicone, 98.5 x 53.5 x 30 cm

Margaret Raspé, Der Sadist schlägt das eindeug Unschuldige (The Sadist Beats the Unquesonably Innocent), 1971, Super 8 transferred to blu-ray, color, silent, 6 min

Margaret Raspé, Alle Tage wieder – let them swing! (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Again – Let them swing!), 1974, Super 8 transferred to blu-ray, color, silent, 19 min

Margaret Raspé, Blau auf Weiß, Ränder und Rahmen (Blue on White Edges and Frames), 1979, Super 8 transferred to blu-ray, color, silent, 18 min

Lena Henke, Eure Frankfurter Küche, 2016
Metal, sand, silicone, fibreglass, epoxy resin, rubber, 70 x 70 x 45 cm

Lisa Holzer, Not yet titled, 2016
Pigment print on cotton paper, Crystal Clear 202/1, polyurethane and acrylic paint on glass, 110.3 x 86.3 cm

Lena Henke, Mein warmer Ofen, 2016
Metal, sand, silicone, fiberglass, epoxy resin, rubber, 44.5 x 44 x 90 cm

Margaret Raspé, Oh Tod, wie nahrhaU bist Du (Oh Death, How Nourishing You Are…), 1972-1973, Super 8 transferred to blu-ray, color, silent, 15 min

Margaret Raspé, Gelb, Rot und Blau entgegen (Towards Yellow, Red and Blue), 1983, Super 8 transferred to blu-ray, color, silent, 28 min

Lisa Holzer, Not yet titled, 2016
Pigment print on cotton paper, Crystal Clear 202/1, polyurethane and acrylic paint on glass, 110.3 x 86.3 cm