Angela Glajcar: FLASHBACK

In her installations, sculptures and objects, Angela Glajcar creates narrative spaces of touching beauty through the marvellous use of paper. The large sheets are torn into shape and added together in a staggered arrangement to form architecturally structured bodies of poetic plasticity. In the exhibition FLASHBACK the two expansive installations “2009-072 Terforation” and “2019-043 Terforation” meet for the very first time in the historic assembly hall of the Kunstraum Dornbirn, spanning a decade of artistic creation.

The titles lead directly to placing the works in Glajcar’s oeuvre: they were created in 2009 and 2019, bear in the catalogue raisonné the numbers 072 and 043 respectively, and are part of the series “Terforation”. Glajcar has been developing this series, very diverse and variable in form and dimensions, since 2006. In her text for the Dornbirn exhibition catalogue, Elisabeth von Samsonow says of the series title: “‘Terforation’ is an artificial term coined by the artist to denote a specific element of her installation works.”[1] In the catalogue raisonné of 2013, Sasa Hanten explains that the term “is derived from ‘perforation’ (Lat. foramen = ‘hole’) on the one hand, i.e. the perforation of hollow or flat objects. On the other hand, the term established by Glajcar alludes to the Latin word for earth, ‘terra’, with which the artist refers to ‘terra incognita’, unknown land, vigin soil.”[2]

The structures of the installations move, always determined by the point of view, between the spheres of the abstract and the representational, between construction and deconstruction, without ultimately committing themselves. They are characterised by the apparent lightness and astounding physicality. An influential factor in this immanent, highly aesthetic ambivalence between material and corporeality is the light that shines on the reflective paper, the torn edges and into the interstices. Here the former industrial hall of Kunstraum Dornbirn offers a particularly attractive environment: the natural light, beaming through the large, all-round lattice windows and shaping the mood inside the building over the course of the day, allows the paper surfaces and sculptural bodies to enter into an exciting, constantly changing relationship with the space. 

Angela Glajcar (*1970, Mainz, Germany) studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg from 1991 to 1998. From 1998 to 2004, she taught there as well as at the Mainz University of Applied Sciences and Arts and the Universities of Giessen and Dortmund, and in 2007 and 2008 she was a visiting professor at the University of Giessen. Glajcar’s works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, such as the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich in Krems (2023/2024), the Jeonbuk Museum of Art South Korea and the Haus des Papiers, Berlin (both 2021), the NMWA National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington (2020), the Sharjah Art Museum (2019), Les3Cha centre d’art Châteaugiron (2018), the CODA Museum Apeldoorn (2017) and a permanent installation at the Museum Wiesbaden (since 2017).

[1] von Samsonow, Elisabeth, “The (W)Hole. Perspectives on the body of ‘Terforation’ works in the oe​uvre of Angela Glajcar”, in Angela Glajcar. FLASHBACK, exhibit. cat., Kunstraum Dornbirn (Vienna: Verlag für moderne Kunst, forthcoming in autumn 2024).

[2] Hanten, Sasa, “Oeuvre”, in Angela Glajcar [Catalogue raisonné up to 2012], ed. Sasa Hanten (Cologne: Wienand, 2013): 38.