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Current

30.01.16 – 10.04.16

CARAVAN 1/2016: Katharina Anna Wieser

Series of Exhibitions of Young Art

Katharina Anna Wieser (b. 1980) is making an installation conceived specially for the Aargauer Kunsthaus. With a piece reduced in terms of material and formal language but extravagant in its technique, the artist is placing a hanging object driven by a clockwork motor in the top-lit room.

All of Katharina Anna Wieser’s works emerge from an intense engagement with the respective exhibition situation. For her precisely situated site-specific installations she uses simple materials to set perceptual processes in motion. She prefers to investigate the situation of walls, floor, ceiling, windows or stairs which define the architectural space. With her new work for the Aargauer Kunsthaus Katharina Anna Wieser continues the artistic engagement that she has been pursuing for several years, involving dynamism and movement.

For the series of CARAVAN exhibitions, Katharina Anna Wieser has chosen the stairway in the top-lit room of the Aargauer Kunsthaus. The wire cable, weighted down with a stone, stretches like a drawn line from the eye of the spiral staircase through the room to the top floor. This lengthy pendulum acts as a drive for the clockwork mechanism and makes the object floating over the stairs rotate. The two spinning, black painted bodies are extremely reduced, to a line and a circle. In her formal language the artist refers to Constructivist art, which is among the highlights of the permanent presentation of the collection and a focus of the holdings of the Kunsthaus.

Katharina Anna Wieser’s kinetic object informed by the dialectic between heaviness and lightness, volume and plane, movement and balance. The suspended object picks up the dynamic of the prominent Kunsthaus spiral staircase and transfers it to the exhibition space. The temporality of the work is experienced through the fine ticking of the clock and the slow downward motion of the pendulum in the eye of the staircase.