Heidrun Sandbichler: Nachtgesang

In recent decades, Heidrun Sandbichler (b. 1970) has created a focused body of work that, poetically and movingly, evokes individual hurt and society’s collective wounds. Though politically engaged, her art is invariably muted. Suggesting rather than shouting, it stems from an aesthetic attitude that transcends blanket statements.

Formally, Sandbichler’s work is stripped to its bare bones, with its material being an important means of expression. For example, she often uses ink that, viscous and dark, contains an element of pause. The silence, pain, and attention demanded of any reading of these works are all equally embodied in it. The ink also refers to writing and, consequently, to memory, a repository of knowledge to which there is no direct access and that manifests as a hunch or shadow.

Sources and references to history spring from some of Sandbichler’s works, initiating transformation processes that lead radically to the present. Her exploration of the total-work-of-art that is Franz von Stuck’s artist’s residence inspired her to create a new piece modeled on Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (Amsterdam, 1665) with its volcanic flows in earth’s interior. A true-to-scale network of lakes and streams filled with liquid ink is positioned in the space as a counterpart to the celestial ceiling of Stuck’s music salon. And when bronze molehills adorn Franz von Stuck’s harmoniously designed classical artist’s garden, we can assume the existence of underground passages that identify the Villa Stuck as a Kafkaesque “burrow.”

In 2023, the Museum VILLA STUCK is presenting the first solo exhibition of Heidrun Sandbichler in Germany.

The first comprehensive monograph on Heidrun Sandbichler will be published by Steidl in July 2023.

Curated by Dr. Helena Pereña.