Group Exhibition “Collage” at Galerie Krobath Vienna, 2018

With: Jiří Kolář, Jiří Kovanda, Dominik Lang, Katja Strunz, Sofie Thorsen, Jenni Tischer

Galerie Krobath’s current exhibition focusses on various approaches to collage, featuring works by several artists represented by the gallery. An array of visual strategies in which bodies play an important role, either by their presence or their absence, as well as the fragmentation of everyday life are crucial to the idea behind this show. Each artist explores how perception and the characteristics of materials lead to collaged works of art. Several contributions deal with the folding of fabrics and textile patterns, underscoring a noticeable absence, or fragmentation of bodies.

Jenni Tischer’s work takes a clear political stance in a collage that refers to the foundation of one of the first American unions with female leadership, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. In 1909, the first strike on record against the exploitation of women and the perilous conditions under which they had to work in the garment industry, took place. It paved the way for numerous strikes. Tischer uses a historic image from an archive of a woman on a picket line and combines it with images that she copied using pins on to grids on to patterns for making clothing, connected, using numerous lines, to various visual axes. The resulting fragmentation juxtaposes the development of digital codes with the history of textiles and the impact this had on the bodies of the women working in those factories. (…)

Text: Walter Seidl / English translation: Deborah S. Phillips

Photos: Rudolf Strobl