Wandler

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With this comprehensive solo exhibition, Galerie Nord offers artist Nadja Schöllhammer a tripartite transformation space in which she will reconfigure the elements, modules and groups of works in her fascinating, exuberant œuvre. By means of her self-developed methods of extended drawing, she dissolves the relationship between drawing, painting, space and narration. In doing so, she plays with accumulation, superimposition, unmanageability and the transformational power of proliferation and divestment.

With an in-situ installation of poster fragments, collages, cut-outs, watercolours and sculptural elements developed especially for the gallery’s central space, Schöllhammer presents a comprehensive visualisation of complex processes of communicating between the sayable and the unsayable. She also shows a selection of two-dimensional works whose thicket of colours, shapes and lines defy quick decipherment.

A starting point of her work is her interest in different cultural rites, legends, myths, dream-like states as well as pre-linguistic processes, which she explores on the level of content and material. She pushes the limits of the fragile and malleable materials she prefers, such as paper and silicone, and works on the fragments of her collages and drawings with scalpel, gas burner and glue gun, accumulating and covering them with a web of lines, nets and structures.

Delusion, transformation, veil, masquerade, pretence and comedy – the grimaces of the protagonists bear witness to lustful and dramatic processes of artistic treatment that oscillate between filigree, precise procedures and open play. She weaves the resulting modules, elements and paper protagonists into a rhizomatic system that itself becomes an actor and in which the knowledge of the physical exterior and the mental interior interpenetrate. We stand and gaze into a thicket of lines and fragile islands where figures cavort under a veil of paint, lines, ink and silicone. With mouths wide open – whispering softly or singing shrilly – they stroll into our underworlds, linger there and change shape together with the three sons of the sleep god Somnus.

In her multifaceted work, Schöllhammer skilfully leads us over the ridge of changes in consciousness, the course of which is often pathologised and described as delusional, but whose coherent thought structures and world inventions could be just as “true” and “real” as generally accepted systems of interpreting reality.

Curated by Veronika Witte

With the kind support of the district funding of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the Karin Abt-Straubinger Foundation.

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