ANNELIESE SCHRENK. Scale & Skin
What does it mean to have skin? For Anneliese Schrenk, skin is far more than a biological envelope. It is both a surface and a vessel — boundary and point of contact, a zone of integrity and a site of vulnerability. In the exhibition Scale & Skin in the tresor at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, the artist explores the limits of skin through impressive, spatially expansive installations. Her investigation into the proportionality of “Scale & Skin” is aesthetic, fragile, at times unsettling, and always a reminder of shelter and protection.
In our film, Anneliese Schrenk and curator Lisa Ortner-Kreil guide us through the exhibition via the artist’s fundamental reflections — not merely explanatory, but intellectually immersive. We encounter cast-off skins from industry — leather bearing traces. Are these defects, flaws, signs of individuality? Schrenk stretches these skins over stretcher frames, tattoos them, referencing the penetrating grasp that elevates modern humans to dominant beings. She reconfigures objects from slaughterhouses, fisheries, tools of control — arranging them anew, making them gleam silver: is it she — or are we the ones — who dress horror in festive disguise?
The film unfolds layers of meaning in Schrenk’s artistic practice: just as dissection in the 16th century opened up new ways of seeing the human body, Schrenk’s work probes contemporary shifts of boundaries — between rawness and fragility, between everyday materials and ritual charge. Fragmented bodies, bound masks, industrial apparatus: the political creeps into the formal, the delicate resides within the brutal.
In this final exhibition in the tresor space of the Bank Austria Kunstforum — long a venue for experimental and radically contemporary positions — Schrenk brings her work to a powerful distillation. Scale & Skin is no easy show; but for those who engage with it, it offers a lingering resonance that truly gets under the skin.
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