07 Oct 2010

Brigitte Waldach: Fall at Kalmar Konstmuseum

Kalmar konstmuseum is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Sweden of German artist Brigitte Waldach (b. 1966). Waldach, who studied under Georg Baselitz, has previously exhibited in Berlin, São Paulo, and New York.

Waldach returns constantly to issues around the relationship between the private and the public, often from a linguistically based perspective. A good example is her installation In the Public's Private Light, a portrait of a city executed in Emden, Kalmar, and Stavanger. The piece consists of red ceiling lamps borrowed from the city's inhabitants for the duration of the exhibition. The lamps are connected to speakers from which soft voices may be heard recounting stories from the lamps' owners. Together they form a choir, mumbling and whispering personal tales somewhere in the borderland between a collection of individual voices and a total sound landscape. The installation works as an artistic expression of the question of what constitutes a city. Its red glow, which will be visible day and night, introduces a sense of the private realm into a public environment, and at the same time dissolves the distinction between those two categories. In the Public's Private Light will be shown in Kalmar as part of the exhibition Fall, together with Waldach's monumental red drawings and one site-specific work.

The red color Waldach unfailingly employs is not an accident. For her, red carries a number of connotations, both emotional and political. Her triptych Deutscher Herbst contains a political indictment of the German welfare system tied to the events there in the fall of 1977, which in turn are related to Swedish politics and culture. In Sweden the color calls forth associations to social democracy, but perhaps just as much to the idea of the Swedish welfare state, folkhemmet, which forms a significant part of the country's positive self-image. By coincidence Waldach's exhibition will open the day before Swedes vote in national elections.

Waldach's work is based primarily in the context of contemporary German history, but it is firmly rooted in the history of Germanic culture of which Sweden once was a part. In this way, Waldach's art can provide a key to a better understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that underlie the structure of Swedish society.

Curator: Martin Schibli
Assistant curator: Oscar Guermouche


Catalogue available: Brigitte Waldach, STURZ / FALL, Editor: Kunsthalle Emden. Authors: Dieter Scholz, Lena Nievers, Martin Schibli. Artists: Brigitte Waldach. Kehrer Verlag. Hardcover 22,5 x 25 cm, 140 pages, 67 color ills. German/English. ISBN 978-3-86828-116-3
please contact: Kehrer Verlag (www.kehrerverlag.com) or Kalmar Konstmuseum (info@kalmarkonstmuseum.se)