Irene Andessner’s self-dramatizations are revivals of historical personalities that utilize memory as a source of reactivation.

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Irene Andessner began her career with painting. She first studied with Emilio Vedova, one of the most important Italian Informal painters, at the Academia di Belli Arti in Venice, and then with Max Weiler and Arnulf Rainer—also a representative of the Informal—at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Andessner encountered paintings by the Italian Renaissance painter, Sofonisba Anguissola, for the first time at an exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The self-portraits fascinated her, more »

Centuries do not have clear boundaries, rather, they flow into each other in the same way that the years which they are made up of do. The transition period in which the nineteenth and twentieth century collapsed into each other was called the fin de siècle. The fact that something was coming to an end was a modern perspective.

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In 1918, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Otto Wagner, and Koloman Moser all died within a year. Accompanying them was the fall of turn-of-the-century, successfully up-and-coming, modern Austrian art. So what remained in terms of artistic progress? For one thing, there was Oskar Kokoschka. He had moved to Dresden and fled—as did a majority of the intellectual and artistic heavyweights—upon the rise of the National Socialists: first to Prague, and then to London. And then there was Herbert Boeckl, who stayed behind. This starting point was not exactly ideal for the development of the painter: an authoritarian, conservative, anti-modern mood prevailed in Austria, along with a shortage of moral support from colleagues. more »

There has been substantial evidence for the theory, according to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, that it is far less important for humans to know who they are, than where they are. The persistent ignorance regarding one’s place of existence is one of the causes for what newer philosophy calls oblivion of being.

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The inquiry after the “where” and the placing of one’s person and works represent central aspects of Wilhelm Scherübl’s work. His work realizes itself in the examination of his locations of residence and life, and in the integration of the respective condition of the places and resources which he finds there. more »

a ) animals that belong to the emperor, b) embalmed ones, c) tamed ones, d) suckling pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous ones, g) stray dogs, h) those that are included in this classification, i) those that tremble as if they were mad, j) innumerable ones, k) those that are drawn with the finest camel hair brush, l) and so on, m) those that have broken the water jug, n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

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This unusual taxonomy of the organisms from the animal realm, attributed by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges to a Chinese encyclopedia, was the inspiration for the French philosopher Michel Foucault for a book about the connection between our world of words and that of things. more »