Specific locations act as impetus for Michaela Frühwirth’s large-format drawings (b. 1972 in Vienna, lives and works in Amsterdam). The drawing process is preceded by intensive research on the context and history of each place and by photographic documentation on site, which transposes the location into two-dimensionality. This approach to drawing does not aim at a pictorial representation of location, but reflects acts of visual and physical perception of the location’s conditions. Countless marks and layers are compacted on paper, ultimately forming autonomous locations made of graphite. Michaela Frühwirth adds so-called footnotes to these drawings, which, in the form of photographs or videos, expand the spatial and referential framework, revealing visual sources of the research.

The exhibition per-form, earthward compiles these (topo-)graphical manifestations of locations, which implement different ways to negotiate the direction specification contained in the title earthward: the last active graphite mine in Austria in Kaisersberg (Styria) is a reference to the transformative processes of geology and the cultural technique of mining. By addressing the source location of the mineral graphite, used for millennia as a technical material and pigment, Michaela Frühwirth reveals the simultaneity of graphite as medium as well as an (artistic) raw material. The entrance to the cave of Chauvet in the South of France, which harbours pictorial evidence of human life from the Upper Palaeolithic age, thematises the act of image-making on one hand, and on the other the symbolic content of doors as the dichotomy between inside and outside. A scree field in the Pyrenees shortly after a rockslide contrasts the precision and dematerialisation of the drawing with the eruptive violence and randomness of the movement.

In the process of transposing a real into a depicted location Michaela Frühwirth enters into a reciprocal interaction with the location and its context. Owing to the lack of a horizon or vanishing point, the drawings deny the observer all orientation within the picture and compress countless items of information into the surface, hence a patient, decelerated response is just as necessary as the (visual) immersion into the medium of graphite.

Curator: Veronika Rudorfer
Opening: Wednesday, 25 April 2018, 7 pm
 

With friendly support of the Mondriaan Fund.