GABRIELE FULTERER / CHRISTINE SCHERRER | as if.

Body parts / parts of bodies: Outlines of almost life-size figures are embroidered onto canvas raw or white, sometimes dissolving into an abstract tangle of lines. As in a palimpsest, paint is applied over this surface, implying a certain degree of body modeling and allowing the figures to meld into color spaces or emerge from them. The palette, which makes use of bright neon colors while at the same time remaining limited to the primary colors and their variations, underlines the expressive rhythm of the embroidery and the painting, whereby it also relates to a graffiti aesthetic: an approach to painting that is flashy and full of contrasts. A game of contradictions and paradoxes begins: the contemplative mode of embroidery, in earlier times associated with the so-called housewife, collides with the aesthetic of accelerated activity characterizing the participants of the sprayer scene at work. “Sgriaffare”: scratching at the vulnerable skin of things, tattooing the organless body, writing on the contingent territories of the unsayable. And then in an act of expansion and inversion: pressing beyond the picture’s edges, bursting out of the formats, liquidation/liquification of the object character. The same figures – now mirrored, rotated, doubled – are painted gesturally on the wall in neon colors, while a fragmentary figure is sewn directly onto the wall in black thread. A painting ground is repeated in another color.

The exhibition sails under the banner of an “as if”. As if it were possible that a norm-transcending power were inherent in embroidery. As if graffiti, applied anonymously under the sheltering curtain of night could be domesticated by bringing it indoors. As if the ornamental and the abstract, in a morganatic marriage, could establish a visual space transforming the tyranny of intimacy into a gesture of liberation, and the delinquency of sprayer art could, through contextual displacement, produce an alternative form of social interaction.

Fulterer / Scherrer’s rampantly growing images, which literally break through their frame, are experimental setups in a visual laboratory, whose purpose, beyond the creation of an injured beauty, is to offer proposals for opening the borders of production techniques. As if the aesthetic concretization of a gesture could at the same time open up the possibility of endless remixes. The magic of the banal, the banality of unconciliatory inscription on the periphery of social norms.

In the words of a well-known pop song:

“You’ve got to pick up every stitch,

must be the Season of the Witch.”

(Thomas Miessgang, 2013)

GABRIELE FULTERER,born in Mürzzuschlag in 1967, lives and works in Vienna. Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Bruno Gironcoli), Mozarteum University Salzburg (Sculpture), University of Salzburg (German Language and Literature).

CHRISTINE SCHERRER,born in Salzburg in 1967, lives and works in Vienna. University of Applied Arts Vienna (Ingeborg Strobl / Erwin Wurm), Mozarteum University Salzburg (Textile Arts / Tapestry), University of Salzburg (History).

Collaboration since 2007.