Design of the exhibition by Verena Dengler at the Secession

Verena Dengler's work is allusive, pointed and sometimes provocative. The attentive observation of the art world, its mechanisms and historically evolved conditions, as well as her own entanglements within it are often the subject of her installations, objects, paintings, drawings, texts, videos (and much more) and reflect them critically, sometimes humorously satirically.

In the exhibition space of the Secession, the artist created a landscape consisting of a pond and a wildly proliferating wasteland or Gstettn surrounding it, in which visitors* encounter other works and elements. The founding period of the Secession with its flowery decorated sales exhibitions was as much a point of reference for the artist in the conception of the exhibition, which she developed in dialogue with the historian of religion Barbara Urbanic, as her examination of the "omnipresent legacy of Romanticism" (Urbanic).

Attributes attributed to it, such as the emphasis on individuality and feeling, the search for the sublime, and at the same time its dark side in the form of melancholy, social criticism, and cultural pessimism, still permeate subcultural youth movements and countercultures, contemporary popular as well as classical music, and much more as a more or less clearly visible substrate. The ideals of Romanticism and their consequences continue to have an impact on social and political spheres today, on the possibilities for shaping the world through social networks, on the development of flexible working conditions - with which artists are very familiar - and on related phenomena of self-optimization.

The works in the exhibition reveal the interplay between past and present, between hegemonic and suppressed, but also subversive forces that shake up prevailing conditions.

Over the years, Dengler's artistic work has increasingly built on networks and collaborative structures, and so this exhibition is the result of diverse collaborations, including with Barbara Urbanic, Itai Margula (exhibition architecture), Astrid Meyerfeld, Leon Kahane, Marlene Engel (Kunstweltgroschenroman), Katarina Schildgen (publication), the band gebenedeit (Lydia Haider, Josua Oberlerchner, Johannes Oberhuber) and Steffanie Ergen (live acts at the opening), MOB Industries (sales performance at the opening).

As an extension of the exhibition, an artist publication in magazine format was published with text contributions by Barbara Urbanic, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anna Gien and Leon Kahane, as well as extensive photo spreads.

Curator Bettina Spörr
ASSISTANT CURATOR Verena Dengler with Margula Architects
TEAM Itai Margula, Jane Zandonai
LOCATION Secession
DURATION of the Exhibition 3. Juli – 6. September 2020
VIDEO Verena Dengler and Barbara Urbanic
in conversation with Kolja Reichert
FOTO Apollonia Theresa Bitzan