Fulterer Scherrer

blingbling

Press preview
Wednesday, 22 November 2023, 10:30 a.m.

Opening
Thursday, 23 November 2023, 7 p.m.

Exhibition Duration
24 November 2023 until 4 February 2024
daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The exhibition is open all day on all public holidays.
Exceptions: 24 December 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.; 25 December closed; 31 December 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.; 1 January closed

The artist duo Fulterer Scherrer is developing an installation for the former assembly hall of the Kunstraum Dornbirn with the resonant title blingbling, which links the preceding series of works studs #2 (2021), studs #1 (2020-21) and bondage (2018-19) with the existing architecture and its infrastructure in an expansive manner.

In these series, Gabriele Fulterer and Christine Scherrer work with a colourful selection of tension belts, stretcher frames, artificial leather, studs and eyelets. Painterly and sculptural elements are combined, sewn, tied and stretched. The constructions are visually appealing and highly aesthetic in their mixture of materials. An intimate, physical relationship to the works is clearly perceptible, created by materiality and processing. This physical connection between viewers and artworks offsets the aloofness of abstraction and playfully conveys issues of identity, sexuality and power. In pop colours, the artists address themes whose treatment has not been normalised even by the media-pushed entry of fetish into the fashionable mainstream: “Treated in the narrow area between painting and object art are questions of dominance, loss of control and pain – ritualised practices of lacing, stretching become a visible, tangible working process for the viewer, stopping at a point of open equilibrium, but revealing the danger of self-destruction.” (Fulterer Scherrer 2021)

The physicality can be experienced especially in the new, oversized works that are being developed especially for Kunstraum Dornbirn. The dimensions of the elliptical wooden frames are borrowed from the historic lattice windows of the industrial hall. At four metres long and 1.80 metres wide, the attached, suspended or intertwined frames playfully occupy the space of the hall, interrupting visual axes and walkways. They structure our experience of space in a fresh way.

The artist duo lives and works in Vienna. Gabriele Fulterer was born in Mürzzuschlag, studied sculpture at the Mozarteum University for Music and Performing Arts in Salzburg and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the master class of Bruno Gironcoli. Christine Scherrer was born in Salzburg, studied textile design at the Mozarteum University of Music and Performing Arts in Salzburg and Painting/Concept at the at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna with Ingeborg Strobl and Erwin Wurm. They have been working together since 2007, interdisciplinarily and across media.