mumok

Agnes Fuchs employs painting, videos, and installations as means to reconfigure the scientific and technological instruments and processes that paved the way for contemporary digital technologies. Operating instructions, functional descriptions, and manuals for oscilloscopes, computers, power supply units, or measuring devices serve as the departure point for her work. By analyzing the cultural implications of these communication media, her artistic practice intervenes in a historical field as well as the afterimages it continues to produce today. Fuchs uses and transforms her source material—not only the technological devices themselves but also their prevalent, disseminated forms. She creates depictions of images that are stored and circulate (often unconsciously) in collective memory. The materiality of painting counters the digital simulacrum or virtuality of circulating images and narratives with a sensory physical experience

The artist applies a cultural anthropological view to technologies. She devises concise settings and hybrid constellations that integrate a multitude of aspects, such as design history, user interfaces, or the imagery and parlance associated with the devices. Even though Agnes Fuchs’s methods are largely analog, her works can be situated in a post-digital context, both in terms of their content and formal aesthetics. She deals with applications of technologies that have become obsolete today or whose functions have been absorbed into the trappings of newer technologies. Her work examines the conditions of the postdigital in the predigital. As Fuchs renegotiates the functions, appearance, or use of devices, which are taken for granted today, she engages in a form of media archaeology that seems more relevant than ever in an age when technical processes are increasingly invisible.

Agnes Fuchs, born 1965 in Vienna. Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna; solo exhibitions and exhibition participant at institutions such as KW Berlin, Neue Galerie Graz, Kunsthalle Wien, Kunsthaus Aarau, Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Kunsthalle Krems, Museum of Applied Arts Cologne, Kunstraum Lakeside Klagenfurt, Galerie Stadtpark Krems, CCS Centre culturel suisse Paris; awards and scholarships from the Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Foundation, AEG Art Prize Ecology (1989), Römerquelle Art Award (1992), Georg Eisler Prize for Painting (1999), Bauholding Art Prize (now STRABAG Artaward, 1999), Culture Prize of the State of Lower Austria (2001), State Studio of the Austrian Federal Chancellery (2006–2012), Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2016). Furthermore, Agnes Fuchs was a fellow at the HWK Institute for Advanced Study (2010–2011) and received the Austrian State Scholarship for Fine Arts (2020) and a fine arts grant from the City of Vienna (2023).

Curated by Franz Thalmair