In Search of the Outside
solo exhibition
Publik Domain
Porgy & Bess, Vienna, Austria
2019
I grew up in the steppe by the sea.
About a hundred years ago, Lissitzky began an attempt to free Suprematism from the two-dimensional plane and translate it into three dimensions. He created the “PROUN” series—a project for the assertion of the new. The transition from painting to architecture, as he himself called it.
I feel as though I’m confining my paintings. Forcing them into their frames. Although I usually don’t frame them, I still limit them with the background of the wall. I set them apart and isolate them. Yet they strive, together with me, for a sense of vastness.
Gestalt psychology attempts to describe the laws according to which perceived stimuli are structured. Thus, in perception, we distinguish between figure and ground. We highlight what we consider important and let the rest recede into the background.
When driving on a country road in the steppe, one loses the sense of spatiality. Nothing grows larger as it approaches. Nothing moves faster as it passes by. The background and the foreground can hardly be distinguished from one another. Three-dimensionality dissolves.
In „The Fold“, Deleuze writes: “Perhaps one can find in modern Informel this preference for positioning oneself ‘between’ two arts – between painting and sculpture, between sculpture and architecture – in order to achieve a unity of the arts as ‘performance’ and to involve the viewer in this performance.”
In the mountains, I feel confined. I stand outside a building and have the feeling of being in a room. In the mountains, there is no outside. In the mountains, one is always framed.
