Maria Bussmann. Either Way

About

The show includes two distinct series of recent drawings by the Vienna (Austria) and New York based artist.

The first series is an artistic response to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus(1921), a significant work of the twentieth century where the philosopher explores the relationship between language and reality. The Tractatus consists of meticulously numbered philosophical terms—declarative statements rather than elaborate arguments; these keywords lost their context and thus the original text is no longer recognizable, the inner logic reduced ad absurdum. By assigning a drawing to each term, Bussmann reverses this process and adds context again. Her series is a work in progress and like the first proposition of the Tractatus “The world is the totality of facts, not of things,” Maria Bussmann’s visualization of the concordance could aim to a ‘world as the totality of images’. Currently, the series has completed the letter A and consists of 60 drawings.

In contrast to her concordance project, the artist’s “Lucky Numbers”, colorful pennants, seem like a banal idea at first. But the triangle shaped drawings are nothing like the commercially available colorful buntings seen at car vendors or suburban shopping malls. Bussmann’s pennants are subtly colored and each number carefully drawn onto ruled notepaper. The artist painstakingly re-creates an everyday object into a precious and unique work of art. The “Lucky Numbers” can be freely and individually arranged—to each his or her own lucky number in his or her preferred color. Both series illustrate Maria Bussmann’s playful as well as profound approach to komplex themes; they offer to broaden our perception of the world—here the reinvention of meaning in the concordance drawings, there the numbers and colors in endless variation-possibilities.