Centrum is pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibition SEHR GUT with works by Sophia Domagala and Dagmar Schürrer. While Domagala will transform the exhibition space with her wall covering paintings, Schürrer will present an installation with recently produced videos. The two artists first met in 2016, and despite the obvious disparity in their different approaches and choices of medium got intrigued about each other’s work and interested in collaborating on a joined project.
Less is more. The work of Sophia Domagala is defined by simplicity. Combining flowers and words or fragmented sentences with simple abstract shapes, the artist creates cheerful, or sometimes gloomy compositions, in a naive way. She explores the essential, often overlooked aspects around simplicity: the complete and the incomplete, the full and the partial figure, permeability, movement and stasis. Thus, omitting any narrative elements, Domagala in her work relies on the human ability to grasp meaning through the eye without the need for additional information. In her work process the artist challenges the established parameters of painting and instead treats the canvas like a sheet of paper: Focusing on immediacy and spontaneity, the artist creates a space devoid of preconceptions – a sensual world, in which through our eyes we feel the rough texture of the canvas or taste the red sweetness of a ripe cherry.
Dagmar Schürrer likewise pushes the boundaries of her medium video and combines found footage with 3D elements and specially generated short animations into complex moving collages accompanied by an equally multi-layered soundtrack. Fragments of text appear and disappear, blending in with the various moving elements to become part of the video’s dynamic choreography. Breaking with traditional narrative techniques, Schürrer turns the screen into a canvas on which she composes and juxtaposes language – her own poetic phrases – and the moving images, showcasing both their inadequacies: it is in the eye of the beholder to decide if “smooth” relates to a clip of a hand rubbing cream onto a leg or to the movements of a photo-real computer generated white fabric blowing in the wind. And do we find the heart pumping in the ribcage in a blue-tinted X-ray “beautiful like marble”? Thus, Schürrer, like Domagala, focuses on the beholder’s own sense of intuition and challenges the sleek aesthetic and alleged objectivity of scientific and computer generated imagery.
Alongside the exhibition there will be an event in cooperation with AGORA COLLECTIVE at Babes Bar on May 4 from 9pm.
The exhibition is supported by Österreichisches Kulturforum.
