07 Mar 2009

Eva Schlegel at Charim Ungar Contemporary

EVA SCHLEGEL

The Vienna based artist Eva Schlegel has worked successfully for many years on an international level in the fields of photography, installation and site-specific intervention. She was teaching for ten years as Professor for Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Eva Schlegel realized many projects in public space using photography as well as new technologies. Last year three permanent projects were finished at Novartis-Campus (2007) in Basel, which have been published by Hatje Cantz in 2008. On Eva Schlegels home page (evaschlegel.com) you will find more information both on her work and her public interventions. The artist is also shown at artnet.

Her works have been shown several times in our Galerie Six Fridrich Lisa Ungar in Munich. Her first show in our Berlin based Galerie Charim and Ungar Contemporary focuses on her latest works. This includes an edition of ten photoengravings entitled „Clouds and more', several large- as well as smaller sized images of clouds printed on lead panels and a video showing a lenticular cloud in its changing forms.

The series „Clouds and more' from 2008 (47 x 34,5 cm) deals with the phenomenon of lenticular clouds. Eva Schlegel transforms photos mostly found on the internet into photoengravings. The strange ufo-like celestial formations, already known to italian fresco painting of the fifteenth century, function similarly to sketches. In Eva Schlegel's work, the weightlessness and the fanciful-utopian appearance of these clouds is confronted with the terrestrial everyday character of the landscape and the architecture. It is exactly the use of found photos in photoengraving which points out to this transition between the immaterial and the material and enables an abstract reading of the work.

The material lead is crucial to Eva Schlegel's artistic practice. In 2005 the artist used it to entirely cover the walls of the Viennese Secession. She also incorporated large-scale round mirrors, which visually tore big holes in the floor. This architectural intervention created a fine balance between the perception of its shear material presence and the reflection of newly opened spacial structures and their meanings. Lead itself becomes the image. Its dull physicality and colourful softness have an ambivalence which is now further developed in Eva Schlegel's images of clouds printed on lead pannels shown at CUC Berlin. The exhibition includes seven screenprints of clouds on lead in the size of 123 x 183 cm and six smaller lead pannels (35 x 53 cm) also mostly dealing with the phenomenon of lenticular clouds. All those works refers to the metaphorical and the literal meanings of lead, as a synonym for heaviness, melancholy and frozen time as well as its use in the field of radiation protection. These are in contrast to the volatility of the clouds. Heaviness can simultaneously become light, dullness can also contain colourful shades and the impenetrable can grasp the vanishing.