ART CITIES: Vienna-Eva Schlegel

Eva Schlegel works in many different media: photography, objects, installations, glass and lead. Some of her most characteristic works are her black and white photographs, transformed from negative and positive film and then transferred onto lead plates in such a way that they almost seem varnished in blue and green nuances. The chromatic light depends on the quality of the lead.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Krinzinger Archive

Eva Schlegel’s oeuvre includes photography, objects, and installations. Her photography often focuses on the aesthetic – though perhaps overlooked – allure of intimate, commonplace spaces – such as the interior of a book, found photography, and our built environment. By removing details in her images, often by capturing images out-of-focus or blurring the details later, Schlegel distills what is otherwise familiar and unremarkable into compositions of abstract beauty. Schlegel’s practice also extends into objects and installations that explore cosmic and human time and an imagined defiance of physical limitations of the body. In her exhibition “Liminal Spaces” Eva Schlegel expands the properties and limits of photography and sculpture by situating each discipline in relationship to the other. Her photographs are studies of space in depth. One looks into them rather than at them. They create the recessive, architectural spaces they purport to represent. Her sculptures, meanwhile, deny depth. Flat, opaque, impenetrable, their mirrored surfaces refuse to reflect either body or being. They fracture the three-dimensional space of existence. In their presence, the viewer experiences absence. This is photography and sculpture that together make possible impossible spaces. Through her lens and in the company of her sculpture, solitude is reconfigured. It becomes a precondition, a gateway through which one must step. Eva Schlegel leads us to the other side of loneliness. It whispers with intimacy and awakens wonder. Oddly familiar, like long-forgotten childhood memories, her photographs reveal interiors to which we might return. Through its fragmentation of a single space, her sculpture manifests an endless array of possible spaces.

Photo: Exhibition view: Eva Schlegel-Liminal Spaces, Galerie Krinzinger-Vienna, 2022, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger

Info: Galerie Krinzinger, Seilerstätte 16, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 9/6-27/8/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-16:00, www.galerie-krinzinger.at/