Margherita Spiluttini
Serien
19 Oct - 22 Dec 2017
MARGHERITA SPILUTTINI
Serien
19 October – 22 December 2017
Margherita Spiluttini's image-spaces are simultaneously spaces of thought and interpretation or even illusion. Because as concrete as the depicted objects seem, as concrete as reality depicted in the photographs stands before our eyes, we are reminded all the more that they are only images of passing states. They are not invariable factors, but motifs that live from wearing the traces of their brief or long histories, motifs about whose future once can conjecture and which in this way become projection surfaces of new worlds of imagination and life models. (cited after Gabriele Conrath-Scholl and Gabriele Spindler, 2015).
The exhibition SERIES contains works from the early creative periods of the artist; parts of her extensive archive are therefore thematised. Very informal scenes from her personal archive, which have never been shown, are displayed as new productions at original image scale in the first gallery room. A spatial, representational or temporal process of transformation thereby takes up a central role, a process which can be found in every one of Margherita Spiluttini's images. This is particularly obvious in the two series dating to 1978 and 1980: the photographer tidies up her kitchen and her living room, the camera is fixed in place, sometimes she herself scurries past - or her cats - like a shadow passing through the image. The assembled, repetitive individual pictures have the effect of film stills.
"Du und ich", "Welt der Tiere" and "Inena" as well as "3 x 5 Spiluttini 1950, 1967, 1993" go a step further and open up for the viewer a supposedly deeper insight into the private sphere of the artist. The initially sketched, ephemeral and open moment is revealed in the interaction with her daughter and in the documentation of her growing up. Margherita Spiluttini's accurate and charming family portraits with her siblings - over decades always in precisely the same pose - stand diametrically opposed to the self-representations which are now so popular in social media. She constructs the pictorial space soberly, without nostalgia or too great proximity. In addition, the temporal distance facilitated the opening up of this part of the archive.
In the second room of the gallery, architecture is treated in just as unusual a fashion: her motifs are not the buildings of Austria's star architects, but instead, architecture of interior and exterior spaces, which is projected in a slide show. They constitute a sort of inventory of recording of the increasing „Verhüttelung" of the rural spaces of Austria since the 1960s and 1970s. In 1991 Walter Zschokke wrote, "What has been plonked down in terms of renovations and new construction in the old settlement patterns of Austria leaves one speechless."
Margherita Spiluttini has also documented the empty, former AKH in Vienna in the early 1990s, before the renovation. The abandoned hospital still reveals traces of its usage in the form of residual furnishings, left behind pieces of clothing, pictures on the walls, and medical apparatus. The fear that is often associated with hospitals, the specific smell and the ghastliness of some interventions can only be sensed in the pictures in a very limited way. The artist has achieved here a partly humourous lightness.
Serien
19 October – 22 December 2017
Margherita Spiluttini's image-spaces are simultaneously spaces of thought and interpretation or even illusion. Because as concrete as the depicted objects seem, as concrete as reality depicted in the photographs stands before our eyes, we are reminded all the more that they are only images of passing states. They are not invariable factors, but motifs that live from wearing the traces of their brief or long histories, motifs about whose future once can conjecture and which in this way become projection surfaces of new worlds of imagination and life models. (cited after Gabriele Conrath-Scholl and Gabriele Spindler, 2015).
The exhibition SERIES contains works from the early creative periods of the artist; parts of her extensive archive are therefore thematised. Very informal scenes from her personal archive, which have never been shown, are displayed as new productions at original image scale in the first gallery room. A spatial, representational or temporal process of transformation thereby takes up a central role, a process which can be found in every one of Margherita Spiluttini's images. This is particularly obvious in the two series dating to 1978 and 1980: the photographer tidies up her kitchen and her living room, the camera is fixed in place, sometimes she herself scurries past - or her cats - like a shadow passing through the image. The assembled, repetitive individual pictures have the effect of film stills.
"Du und ich", "Welt der Tiere" and "Inena" as well as "3 x 5 Spiluttini 1950, 1967, 1993" go a step further and open up for the viewer a supposedly deeper insight into the private sphere of the artist. The initially sketched, ephemeral and open moment is revealed in the interaction with her daughter and in the documentation of her growing up. Margherita Spiluttini's accurate and charming family portraits with her siblings - over decades always in precisely the same pose - stand diametrically opposed to the self-representations which are now so popular in social media. She constructs the pictorial space soberly, without nostalgia or too great proximity. In addition, the temporal distance facilitated the opening up of this part of the archive.
In the second room of the gallery, architecture is treated in just as unusual a fashion: her motifs are not the buildings of Austria's star architects, but instead, architecture of interior and exterior spaces, which is projected in a slide show. They constitute a sort of inventory of recording of the increasing „Verhüttelung" of the rural spaces of Austria since the 1960s and 1970s. In 1991 Walter Zschokke wrote, "What has been plonked down in terms of renovations and new construction in the old settlement patterns of Austria leaves one speechless."
Margherita Spiluttini has also documented the empty, former AKH in Vienna in the early 1990s, before the renovation. The abandoned hospital still reveals traces of its usage in the form of residual furnishings, left behind pieces of clothing, pictures on the walls, and medical apparatus. The fear that is often associated with hospitals, the specific smell and the ghastliness of some interventions can only be sensed in the pictures in a very limited way. The artist has achieved here a partly humourous lightness.