Eva Schlegel: liminal spaces

To make possible impossible space. 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.

One finds oneself aching to enter her photographic spaces and can’t; one seeks self-reflection in her sculpture and loses any sense of self in the looking. The result is work that is poignantly, profoundly human. It expresses the limitless longing of the human person to be recognized and embraced; at the same time, it demonstrates the inconceivability of ever having that desire fulfilled.

Through her lens, however, 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. Confronting the absence that Eva makes present, one is opened to the infinite depth and overwhelming fullness of being (Timothy Don).

Eva Schlegel was a professor of art and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1997 to 2006. In 2011 Eva Schlegel was Austrian commissioner at the Venice Biennale, in 1995 she was already represented at the Austrian Pavilion as an artist.

Eva Schlegel’s works is shown internationally, her work has been presented at the Sidney Biennale (1988 and 1992), at Aperto, Venice Biennale (1990) the 15th Bienal Internacional de Arquitectura de Buenos Aires (2015), Photobiennale MAM Moscow (2014) and at the Kochin Muziris Biennale (2017), India. Her works can be found at renowned collections such as Albertina, Vienna, Belvedere, Vienna, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, LACMA, Los Angeles, Brooklyn Museum, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including Albertina Modern, Vienna 2021, LACMA Los Angeles 2021, Oklahoma Contemporary 2020, Ferenczy Museum, Hungary 2019, Kunstforum Vienna 2019, Kunsthalle Krems 2018, Belvedere Winterpalais, Vienna 2015, MAK, Museum for Applied Arts, Vienna 2010 and Secession, Vienna 2005.

She has realized many big site specific interventions, e.g. Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, MQ Libelle, Vienna, Novartis Campus, Basel and will be represented with two permanent architectural interventions in the presently renovated Austrian parliament (opening autumn 2022).