rauminhalt_harald bichler
space & content

Georgia Creimer’s exhibition tears the rauminhalt [space & content] that is familiar to us as a gallery out of its accustomed reality and its temporal setting; the exhibition is at the same time the contents of the space and the space itself. Autonomous and in its paradoxicality only obliged to its own rules, in a charming way Georgia Creimer’s work takes the audience into its uniquely ambivalent world – in order to throw it in a certain simultaneity unexpectedly back on itself.

Luis Buñuel’s film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) inspired the title of Georgia Creimer’s show. Not only does the exhibition share the ironic-critical allusion to the bourgeoisie with the film, the so-called society and its distorted conditions that dominate the shared life as well as individual actions, but in both works the surrealist form of narrative is also the telling stylistic device for multiple meanings.

However, the respective developmental processes are far less comparable. The works by the São Paulo artist are based on drawings which she initially does with her eyes closed; she allows the pencil in her hand to dance across the page in broad movements. From the gentle fabric of the intermingled lines she filters concrete contours which merge into fixed shapes and stand on the picture surface as individual elements or configurations. Thus artistically amorphous forms emerge, whose organic appearance is marked by an imaginary physicality. Deprived of temporality, with a subtle crypticism, they transmit an archetypical activity which cannot be categorised and whose individualism eludes any definiteness.

Photographs of these drawings make up the rich repertoire of compositions which the artist draws on. With the aid of projections, these drawings are scaled up onto the image carrier and simulating volumes are executed with detailed precision in the respective technique. Drawings and paintings on canvas or paper, but also objects, sculptures and installations are realised in this way.

Georgia Creimer’s bizarre beings are formally reminiscent of Rococo ornaments. In Harald Bichler’s rauminhalt these are also extended on wallpaper similar to 18th-century grotesques; they occupy whole walls and thus the space, which they inspire with a strange, quasi-civic atmosphere.

The stage-like presentation includes walls with wallpapers, on which Georgia Creimer sets her drawings, paintings and photo works; compelling references immediately occur in the formal similarities: the individual elements appear as if in modules similar to a coded language in various measures in repetitions and reflections; as a seated sculpture the basic motif of the wallpapers in the front room has actually assumed physicality; it can be recognised in gigantic size on a drawing in the last section. On the black-white ground of the wallpapers, the flesh-tone watercolours appear even more lively; they awaken irritating associations. Primordial forms driven to excess seem to have been fixed in a ghostly movement as a refined reality. In details, the diligence of the fine elaboration discloses itself in shimmering nuances: Georgia Creimer has created her ambivalent beings with loving commitment, has endowed the bizarre monstrosity with an enigmatically comical, but also poetic dimension. The moment of a transformation that cannot be fathomed fills the entire sequence of the gallery rooms.

Margareta Sandhofer