Oswald Egger
es everything flow? Intermediate images - January 25 until February 22, 2025

 

The gallery is closed until the opening of the exhibition with works by Oswald Egger on 25 January. Visits are possible by appointment.

Opening: Saturday 25 January, 4 - 7 pm

We wish you a Happy New Year, in which art brings many wonderful moments and encounters for everyone. We are looking forward to our collaboration with Oswald Egger, which begins in 2025. We have followed Egger's work as a writer and artist with great interest and enthusiasm for many years. His performance-like readings are unforgettable. In 2024, he was honoured with the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize for his outstanding writing skills. His books are places of word and image inventions. This first gallery exhibition is dedicated to the latter.

The invitation card shows a special drawing: it is Egger's first drawing, a sheet from 1992 before the first publication. It is based on a reproduction of the course of the Adige. Together with the exhibited Tagliamento series from 2021, it inspires the title of the exhibition: Fließt - alles? Egger describes his works on paper as in-between images, a term that is discussed not least in the context of the exhibition.

Egger, a border crosser between word and image, writes: ‘My books are - complementary to the text - interspersed with illustrations, drawings, watercolours, figures and their constellations, which are necessary for thought. It is almost impossible to determine which compartments are to be attributed to the illustrative images and figures and which to the textual ground. The illustrations can even be understood as a form of writing in which images constantly replace the words and facts or accompany them word for word, the silent, constant action and externalisation of a multitude of glances, internal and fleeting: All of the pictures were originally drawn for a specific book, for the purpose of gesturally scanning the pages and texts. Increasingly, however, the figures dispose of this level of determination; the schemes, images and figures separate themselves from their ground and blur into their closest surroundings to reality, separated, they detach themselves from the real world in the world like free, radical exfoliations and thus drift into images like these: as unimaginable trust in intuition, which not only knows how to intertwine the boundaries of the unhidden or the invisible, but will inevitably continue to draw from it, Alinea, deciphering it.’

Owald Egger was born in Lana (South Tyrol) in 1963 and lives and works in Neuss (DE). He has been Professor of Language and Form at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel since 2011. In 2022, he was invited by the artist Bogomir Ecker to be part of the exhibition Futura - Vermessung der Zeit at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Since 2018, Egger has been a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts in Düsseldorf, which showed his work in 2022.