Museum Haus Konstruktiv is honoring Austrian artist Brigitte Kowanz with a comprehensive solo exhibition. This retrospective show conveys how, since the 1980s, Kowanz has been making it possible to experience the medium of light as both a stand-alone phenomenon and an information carrier.

Not all light is the same. This is made apparent in the objects, installations and spatial interventions that Brigitte Kowanz (b. 1957 in Vienna, lives and works in Vienna) has been producing for a good forty years with the use of various light sources. In her comprehensive exhibition at Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Kowanz demonstrates just how diverse this intangible fleeting medium can be.

Critical engagement with the conventional concept of the image and painting was one of the factors that led Kowanz to use light as an artistic medium. Aiming to go beyond this concept, the artist began to experiment with transparent image carriers and luminous pigments around the year 1980, after graduating from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Together with artist Franz Graf, she applied phosphorescent and fluorescent paint to both sides of canvases and sheets of paper. Hung freely in the room and illuminated with daylight or black light, these caused iridescent glowing scenarios to unfold, breaking up the stability and hermeticism of conventionally painted pictures and creating an integrative relationship between the work, space and observer.

This mediation between image space and real space via light is a constant in Kowanz’s artworks. Thus, her oeuvre knows no strictly separable periods in which one material replaces another. Instead, she keeps returning to certain light sources, techniques, forms and formulations over the years, and contemplating them further. Accordingly, the exhibition on the fourth and fifth floors at Museum Haus Konstruktiv is neither chronologically nor thematically structured, but is instead an atmospherically harmonious arrangement of coexisting and juxtaposed representative works from the past four decades.

Brigitte Kowanz

Lost under the Surface