-16- BRIGITTE KOWANZ
Mirrored Shaded Spaces− Kowanz has developed site-specific installations called in light of light for each of the six echibition spaces in the Galerie im Taxispalais. They range from works dating from the lat 1990s to her most recent work complexes, giving a sense of Kowans’s artistic concerns in each space with different accents on form and content. The exhibition focuses clearly on themes that have been with her since the 1970s and that she was worked on with increasing sophistication since then. These are the mutual relationships between light, language and reflectionor the polar tensions between material and light with their diverse interactions which viewers are drawn into as well. Kowanz’s conceptually conceived work is based on abstract philosophical thought presented on the basis of scientific and technological insights, but it is thought that emerges in each individual work, in every presentation in a room, with extraordinary sensuality and atmospheric density, and indeed beauty as well. Her attempts to come to terms with film, video and photography led her to addressing the phenomenon of light, which has effectively become her trade mark, at at a very early stage. The work with mirrors began in places in the 1980, but is then used consistently as ambiguous material in objects and installations from the late 1990s, pushing forward and extending questions about content. Text and language, also coded in Morse form, are further elements in the complex interplay of seeing and understanding , perception, knowledge and insight that form the
component parts of of Kowanz’s powerful works. She brings light, mirror and language together within the concept of space, which is her actual research field, in which physical space does not seem to be seperate from metaphorical and virtual space. By interrogating the co-ordinates of three-multiple perspectives and takes us into new and different thought and perception categories. The speed of light is invoked over and over again in her work, which refers at the same time to the incomprehensible presence of light, to its unimaginable, absolute value, and to the fact that it can be measured precisely, but alsoo the praidity of with which information is conveyed electronically. Brigitte Kowanz gave her recent exhibition in the Museum Ritter the challenging title Think Outside the Box. This corresponds with the work called Lateral thinking (2010), which is to be seen in the Galerie im Taxispalais exhibition. It is part of a seies of cubes consisting of mirror glass with neon lettering set into it. In contrast with early work groups, the lettering is executed in personal handwriting, whose subjective momentum contrasts with the geometry of the mirror object, and the two words are set in mirror writing: “lateral” can be read in the reading direction, and “thinking” relationship is reversed. This work seems programmatic in many respects. With the cube, Kowanz has created a model spatial unit that is complete in itself, a kind of sphere in which she causes the lettering to float in the space like enegmatic images that multiply because of the mirror construction and ta-