Secession

Maria Bussmann

26 Nov 2010 - 13 Feb 2011

© Maria Bussmann, 2010
MARIA BUSSMANN

26 November, 2010 – 13 February, 2011

Maria Bussmann’s drawings often grow out of her readings—she works with the philosophical writings e.g. of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or Ludwig Wittgenstein. The artist transfers the visual ideas that develop as she reads and processes what she reads into two-dimensional space. In her series, which are usually designed to encompass numerous drawings, she shows thought-images and chains of associations that must be understood not so much as illustrations of the source texts but rather as an open-ended commentary on and annotation to philosophical thinking. At the same time, her works represent the insistent attempt to fathom the epistemological quality of her medium, drawing.

The original textual material is thus brought to an immediacy the writings, published in books, could in this form never possess. The formal aspects of thin paper—she also uses sales-receipt paper rolls or seemingly endless paper tapes—further emphasize the ephemeral character of Maria Bussmann’s work. The artist inverts the Surrealist methods of “écriture automatique” into a process of visualization that brings the different modes of expression in language/writing, drawing, and space together, ultimately relating subjective worlds of understanding to a scientific praxis. For her exhibition in the Secession’s Grafisches Kabinett, Maria Bussmann realizes a series of drawings based on a stay of several weeks in Long Beach (New York, US). The artist will also present sculptural work.

Maria Bussmann was born in Würzburg (Germany) in 1966. The artist studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and Vienna; she also studied philosophy and cultural studies at the University of Vienna, where she earned a Ph.D. Maria Bussmann lives and works in Vienna and New York.
 

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