Opening: Monday, 22 February, 7 p.m.
Introduction: Petra Noll
Artist talk with Catharina Freuis:
Thursday, 17 March, 7 p.m.
sponsored by: BKA Kunst; MA7-Kultur; Cyberlab; Land Vorarlberg – Kultur; Michael Sprachmann – Fine Art Printing and Framing, thanks to: Salon Iris
Since 2010 the FOTOGALERIE WIEN has put on an annual solo exhibition showcasing the work of a young, upcoming artist. This series of exhibitions, SOLO, functions as a platform and springboard for artistswho are at the beginning of their career but who already have an extensive body of work that could be presented to a wider public with advantage. The aim is to achieve a sustainable level of public presence forthe chosen artist and includes helping to organise cooperations and touring shows. For SOLO VII we have invited the Austrian artist Catharina Freuis who lives in Vienna and Bregenz.
Catharina Freuis, born in 1985, studied under Gabriele Rothemann at the University of Applied Arts and graduated with a diploma. For many years she has been represented in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. Her art work is concerned with issues of space. For this she makes miniature models of public or private rooms – created from a synthesis of many rooms she has viewed. She intervenes in these deserted rooms making various alterations and records the newly-created situations in photographs which usually then take the form of a multi-part series that becomes the sole end product.
In her SOLO show for the FOTOGALERIE WIEN, Freuis is presenting an overview of the various approaches to her room interventions. Here, she is interested in questions about how rooms can be repeatedly transformed or reduced but nevertheless remain either recognisable as what they are or in some cases become unrecognisable. She instigates new perceptions of space and manages to maintain a lively discourse that opens up new avenues of approach. The involvement with photography as a medium located between truth and fiction and her engagement with two- and three dimensions plays a critical role in the work. Freuis’s interventions trigger irritation in various ways. In addition to surreal metamorphoses she has been working with, in particular, perspective and the contrast between dark and light as the two series, Arrangements and Darbietung. In these, she creates instability to situate the rooms – and the viewer – into an intermediary state between limitation and openness, visibility and invisibility, light and dark. More recently, in her three-part cycle, Symphony, where each part consists of a number of photographs, she applies musical principles to her spatial investigations. Freuis works here with extremely reduced means, with spatial constitutions using objects, perspectival experiments and various, diverse strong lighting designs that come close to dissolving space altogether.
(textual support: Petra Noll)