Eva Schlegel

(Hall in Tyrol 1960)

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Biography

Eva Schlegel

Eva Schlegel is one of Austria's most important contemporary artists. She was born in Hall in Tyrol in 1960 and studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under Oswald Oberhuber and international guest professors such as Joseph Beuys and Mario Merz from 1979 to 1985. In 1995 she designed the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in collaboration with Coop Himmelblau. There she placed a large-format glass wall with blurred black text lines in front of the facade of Josef Hoffmann's building and achieved international fame. In 2011, she was appointed commissioner herself and curated the Austria Pavilion, which featured Markus Schinwald that year. From 1997 to 2006, Eva Schlegel taught as professor of art and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The artist works in a wide variety of techniques and is also known for her spatial installations. Her most recent work in the public space is located on the roof of the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Designed by Laurids and Manfred Ortner, the MQ Libelle features an iconic lighting fixture by Brigitte Kowanz and glass walls by Eva Schlegel.

The concept of blur is essential to Eva Schlegel's work. Blurring as a stylistic principle in photography and painting has not just been a topic since Gerhard Richter. Tendencies to let pictorial objects blur softly with purely painterly means emergd firstly in the Renaissance with the "sfumato". In photographic art, where sharpness is considered an expression of a quality, tendencies to use deliberate blurring to elevate photography beyond a purely scientific depiction also became apparent early on. A wide variety of technical aids, such as converging lenses, pinhole cameras and various filters were developed and it soon became apparent that "good" photography does not necessarily have to be sharp. A "camera not only has the function of redefining, reversing the gaze relationship, but also possesses a 'psychotechnical' significance. According to its model the spheres of the conscious and the unconscious are correlated"¹.

Light also plays a major role in Eva Schlegel's works, she uses color sparingly but skilfully, often in a reduced manner of black and white. A stong point of focus for the artist are the delicate nuances that arrise in the process of blending the different gray values. The facial features of the photographed women beginn to fade and their contours diffuse into the background. Randomly selected motifs are enlarged, copied or photographed and blur together into indistinctive memory images on a wide variety of mediums. "The deliberate use of obscuration reduces the information output of the images, makes the motifs appear softer, in dissolution, and shifts them towards the shadowy and painterly."² Transposed into larger-than-life dimensions, the "ideal image becomes at the same time an exaggeration"³. Eva Schlegel is not solely concerned with the individual photographic motif and even less with its unambiguous photographic representation, but primarily with its "plastic-architectural effect as an initially inconspicuous pure object"⁴.
The viewer who engages in unprejudiced viewing is thus presented with novel, never before captured pictorial worlds in which the depicted female figures, as dreamlike apparitions surrounded by an aura of uniqueness, form a conscious antithesis to the media overpresence of the image of humanity in the present day.

¹ Florian Steininger, Andreas Hoffer (eds.), Eva Schlegel. Spaces, exhibition catalog, Kunsthalle Krems, Krems 2018, p. 30.
² http://sammlung-essl.at/jart/prj3/essl/main.jart?content-id=1363947043047&rel=de&article_id=1364874376530&reserve-mode=active (zugegriffen am 1.7.2021)
³Eva Schlegel quoted in: Steininger, p. 45
⁴Ingo Taubhorn, Eva Schlegel. The Art of Targeted Photographic Intervention, in Peter Noever (ed.), Eva Schlegel. In Between, exhibition catalog, MAK, Vienna 2010/2011, p. 57.

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