KEEP IT COMPLEX AND KEEP THE JOB

Many of Anne Speier's works document the distensions and deformations that objects and figures undergo in order to both understand and transcend the limitations of the meaning ascribed to them, their potentials and interrelations. Yet the artist also subjects the media she works with to such stretching. Aesthetic qualities are one way to defy certain expectations; absurdity and otherness are another.
In her exhibition in the Secession's sublevel gallery, Speier intertwines painting and sculpture in a kind of utopian architecture, short-circuiting its spatial premises with its metaphorical purport. The show examines the challenges that teachers and students at art schools face along images and installations that limn psycho-emotional topographies.
They counter the distrust of art education and the associated hierarchical understanding of aesthetic phenomena with an ambivalent desire for the responsibility that is needed for analyzing the objects in one's environment and making something new out of them.
Concept: Anne Speier

Text: Inka Meißner