With her wall-mounted ceramics–which are distributed throughout the gallery’s floors–and the large-format posters she has painted over, Astrid Wagner normally opens up gray areas, where all kinds of disdurbances, fears, and projections have their place. Particularly in the large-format advertising posters, which she has painted over with laquer, Wagner brings back the self-improved models to a shapeless, polymorphous perverse blot-existence. For Vienna Complex, Wagner has developed a textile wall hanging used throughout the exhibition in order to hold together the exhibition spaces, which partially seem scattered, like bandages. Specifically, the textile wall hangings are inspired by Sigmund Freud’s Vienna coat room (including the textile borders). Wagner also understands this intervention as a development of the strong interior architecture of the Austrian Cultural Forum, with its primeval material language.
Text by Cosima Rainer
Untitled [ fig 1 ]
Glazed ceramic
19 × 28 × 12 cm
Untitled [ fig 3 ]
Glazed ceramic
46 × 24 × 11 cm
City Lights [ fig 4 ]
Acrylic on advertisement poster
175 × 118,5 cm
Vienna Complex
Austrian Cultural Forum
New York City 2014
