Ashley Hans Scheirl. Currencies of De* Capital Delirium

About

Paintings, sculptures, and drawings merge in the gallery spaces to form a room-filling installation. They lead the visitor into an exuberant, seemingly insane dream world. Consumption and the search for meaning, restriction and freedom, greed and renunciation, excess and isolation, rebellion and resignation, identity and transformation, gender and hierarchy, individual lifestyles and the global economy of rejection collide here and culminate in a digital-anarchist-neutralized big bang, or at least in a new world currency that gives the exhibition its title: Currencies of De*Capital Delirium.

Angela, Angela Scheirl, Angela Hans, Angel Hans, Zeze Hans, Ah, A A A A, Hans Scheirl, Hans, Hansi, Hansda, Hans von S/hit, Scheirl, Ashley Hans Scheirl was born in Salzburg (Austria), in 1956. She lives in Vienna. The work she did in the 1990s as part of London’s underground dyke scene contributed to the development of a conceptual practice that was constantly exchanging with the Viennese scene via the techniques of experimental cinema, painting, object art, actions in public space, performance and music, with all genres treated as equal. Indeed, in this artist’s practice, these “disciplinary techniques” are brought together to function on the model of a lesbian, queer sexuality. This transitioning of one fine arts category toward another was accompanied during these years when the artist was moving between London, Vienna, and New York by a metamorphosis of her/his own body, helped by the injection of testosterone. Her/his mutating name reflects this constant becoming which is never really static. Her/his recent self-expression in the use of painting, after multiple experiments with Super 8 and video cameras, encouraged Angela—now Hans—to transform her/his masculine look by a new phase of emancipation and to become Ashley, a painter who carefully cultivates her/his androgynous appearance.*