In her first solo exhibition at the gallery, the Austrian photography artist MICHAELA BRUCKMÜLLER (b. Wels, 1971), who is renowned for her hyperrealist large-format shots of plants and expressive photographic portraits with a painterly aura, presents works from diverse cycles.
Taking inspiration from Aristotle’s On Coming to Be and Passing Away, a treatise of natural philosophy in which the Greek philosopher subjected fundamental questions of human existence to theoretical inquiry, BRUCKMÜLLER scrutinizes the perishability of organic systems. Among her motifs are flowers, shelf fungi, lichens, and roots. A central theme in the works is darkness. Proceeding with a scientist’s meticulousness, BRUCKMÜLLER, who boasts decades of experience in analog photography and extensive knowledge of botany, collects an ample variety of organic specimens. Using a range of photographic recording equipment, she embeds them in a deep black, employing a single source of light as a kind of chisel to accentuate the organic bodies emerging from the background. The visual isolation brings the smallest and most inconspicuous details to light. As the artist notes, “bathing the plants in this black void helps me explore their distinctive finitude and vulnerability. Black reveals and exacts precision in the execution.” Artists of different eras like Caspar David Friedrich, Francisco de Goya, Pierre Soulages, and Kazimir Malevich studied the radicalism and impact of the color black. BRUCKMÜLLER revisits their fascinating insights and translates them into pictures that, in their complexity, chart a singular visual cosmos.
At the heart of the exhibition stands a selection from the ongoing cycles Danse Macabre and Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen. Tulips, buttercups, poppies, autumn crocuses, lilies of the valley, and mushrooms growing on trees are depicted singly in their majestic beauty or in arrangements gathering various stages of their existence. Not unlike a danse macabre or dance of death, a traditional form illustrating that death is life’s equal, the photographs capture the instant of both beauty and mortality.
On occasion of the exhibition, the artist has moreover added new works to her Grain series. In this instance, it is brimstone butterflies, moths, and dragonflies that serve BRUCKMÜLLER as models, marking a second thematic focus of her oeuvre. The insects, which charm the viewer with their preternatural vitality and luminosity, are embedded in the infinite blackness together with soil samples and grasses from their natural environment.
Also on display is a selection from the recent portrait project NYX, in which the artist interweaves myth and Christian iconography in a hybrid narrative. The stage, again, is the expanse of night, in which she now casts women of different ages in traditional garb from the regions of Carinthia and Burgenland, rendering them in time exposures. In this instance, BRUCKMÜLLER wields the solitary source of light like a “brush,” as she puts it, to achieve a chiaroscuro (light-and-dark) effect that will remind beholders of late-Renaissance and Baroque art. The portraits in small formats are the fruits of extensive preparations. Not unlike paintings, shots like these require the protagonists to invest considerable amounts of time. At first blush, it is virtually impossible to distinguish the photographs from painted portraits. The attire transforms the women; the night enveloping them makes room for interpretations and heightens the tension intrinsic to the pictures. The small format lends the works an air of immediacy, even intimacy.
INSTALLATION