Raphaela Vogel at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Raphaela Vogel
Bellend bin ich aufgewacht
 

Tired hides, secured at their ends, hang wearily from the walls. Raphaela Vogel has painted goat and elk hides and weighted them with polyurethane. They display feral gestural traces, scenes of violence, and fleeting faces that gaze out like dull mirrors from the almost triangular pieces of leather. Vogel sites such imagery next to spatially expansive video sculptures. Delicate rods, plastic sheeting, and technical equipment are fixed components in these arrangements. The rods create an impression of drawings in space, the sheeting of amorphous stage scenery, and the devices of flickering spotlights. Some things seem to be mobile, whilst others exist in a labile state or are set in violent tension. The components are attached to each other by ropes and evoke processes of physical transformation. Aluminum trusses encroach into the space or congregate as giant candelabras to totalitarian statues.

These elements from the world of technology contrast with the video imagery that Vogel edits from various fragments, such as self-portraits and drone footage. The latter circles violently, is rotated or mirrored, kaleidoscopic effects and dizziness result. Another group of works by the young artist involves casts in acrylic, usually life-size sculptures of animals that repeat themselves, or isolated sculptures that can assume giant proportions.

Raphaela Vogel generates links between sculpture and video, space and the readymade. Her art exists in a physically palpable tension and in a richly contrasting interplay between imagination and scale. Powerful and energetic spaces evolve, bringing into focus issues pertaining to human, especially female, subjectivity. Kunsthaus Bregenz, with its tranquil industrially seeming spaces, is not only suitable for such spatially expansive sculpture, its scale alone provides the very best scenario for Vogel’s experiments. (press release)
 

Raphaela Vogel (*1988, Nürnberg) studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main. Her solo exhibitions have included ones at Kunsthalle Basel (2018), Berlinische Galerie (2018), Volksbühne Berlin (2017), BQ Galerie, Berlin (2016), and at Bonner Kunstverein (2015). She lives in Berlin.

19 October 2019 – 6 January 2020
https://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at