Thomas Reinhold | Maruša Sagadin

About

The sculptress Maruša Sagadin and the painter Thomas Reinhold represent two very distinct, individual positions that follow completely different aesthetic paths. And yet experimental arrangements can be found in the works of both artists, allowing a joint exhibition: the playing with the unexpected, the dialect of form and resolution.

Maruša Sagadin produces coloured, vertically towering geometric modules reminiscent of skyscrapers. Or horizontal structures in the form of benches on which the viewer would preferably rather sit down straight away. Both artistic positings are complemented or contrasted by irregularly rounded or jagged forms. The viewer experiences this as an artistic reductionism of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, of manneristic proliferation and of rational quasi-architectonic language of forms.

In Thomas Reinhold's work, the abstract ballet of lines and blotches, generated by processes of pouring, first strikes the eye, dominating the picture space in coloured graduations between pastel colours and bold colours, between hot and cold. Yet that which could be presumed to be a continuation of the Drip Paintings of Jackson Pollock or the poured paintings of Hermann Nitsch is in reality the result of an almost mathematical experimental arrangement, which pre-structures the painting process in sketches, and which then evolves with a certain desire for the unexpected and for the aleatoric: the directions of the pouring of the colours are predefined, and during the process are frequently adjusted to the situationally altering given conditions. In this way, in the multiple repetition of the process, superimpositions occur and palimpsest-like structures emerge.

Just as one imagines to be able to read landscape forms or impressionistic hallucinations of form out of Thomas Reinhold's immaterial configurations, in the architectonic-functional figures by Maruša Sagadin there are narratives which do not disclose themselves via the process of observing, but instead operate virtually as background radiation; and in the displaced applications to the geometric repertoire of forms push outwards – something like references to feminine and feministic topoi that are evoked through pop- and comic-like oversimplifications/enlargements of body parts. The work deals with an anthropomorphisation of materially bound objectivity, with the questionable gender connotations that are connected with spaces, and with the relationship between the private and the public sphere that makes infrastructures, as functionally interpretable objects, out of leaps in dimensions. In short: an unsettling interplay between social utility and a playful Stop Making Sense that would like to counteract socio-political stereotypes.

"We can only perceive the world as it appears to us," as the philosopher Christoph Türcke once wrote. "But appearances are always merely an exterior: appearances of something, that itself does not appear." Both Maruša Sagadin and Thomas Reinhold lend this 'something' an artistic form that would like to help that which is hidden not necessarily 'to appear', but to provide it with an aesthetic presence. Actuality and phantasm, reality and dream, control of being and irrational externalisation: in this way the compositional forms of abstraction and postmodernity develop new energy.

(Thomas Miessgang, Vienna 2020)