Talking Textures at Kunstverein Eisenstadt

The exhibition “TALKING TEXTURES” shows works by Sasha Auerbakh, Nicoleta Auersperg, Karoline Dausien, Nadine Lemke and Michaela Schweighofer who appropriate various craft techniques in their sculptural practices. In this process they examine the narrative potential of the material with all its qualities, traditions and attributions as well as its role in the process of artistic form-finding. Nicoleta Auersperg, for example, forms glass under utmost physical efforts to square shaped objects, Sasha Auerbakh shows bent metal sculptures alluding to rustic wrought-iron shop signs and Nadine Lemke crochets fragile floor-to-ceiling objects out of metal threads. But also subversive spaces to investigate social processes are created; Michaela Schweighofer and Karoline Dausien also apply feminist and socio-political approaches in their ceramics and textile works. In the spirit of New Materialism that things and materials do not remain passive but have their own agency, the material itself can become a (co-)actor.

The exhibition is part of the series „Material Narratives“ presented by Kunstverein Eisenstadt which comprises four parts shown within one year. The exhibition series assembles works by artists that are primarily determined by materiality. The objects and things on display will often not be completely functional, will not tally with an artisan’s idea of the proper material, or playfully deal with materiality and traditional craftsman’s knowledge. Everyday things are cited or transformed into hybrid products whose purpose does not seem obvious or is reduced to absurdity. They explore the qualities of surface textures that irritate and surprise, seduce to grasp them at best, and thus lunge out into “material narratives” that attempt to achieve refreshing appropriations, adaptations, and reformulations.