Annegret Bleisteiner.
Passau, Germany, 1968.
Artist in Residence 2020.
By the point of view of a painter I work on different artistic fields i.e. painting, new media and installations including different techniques. The initial point for an installation is set up by the place, by the form of exhibition, thus, by reacting on the situation which determines the media. The essence of my work is an understanding of world by regarding movement, time and space: movement in time, movement beyond time and space, space as medium of dimension, disappearance of space etc. Mainly, I deal with amplification of dimension comparable to absurd test arrangements. Absurd, because of their being in images and their physical collapse. By failing within their dimensional structure, they reveal their unique essence. So I try to re-discover and re-model the basic idea of thought models and patterns of orientation by creating themes provoking the revise of given structures or the innovation of new spaces into the unconscious. The results are spaces between emotion and understanding questioning the human existence in terms of polarity.
Annegret Bleisteiner still explores themes of consumerism and the problems of mass production, but her change in perspective clearly elicits new facets in her oeuvre. Color is now foregrounded. Consumer relics made of plastic, paper, textiles, and other debris from the prevalent throwaway society remain her materials of choice. A certain levity in the artist’s approach transforms this otherwise disquieting subject into a collection. The artistic focus on environmental problems is evident and leads to concerning and at the same time alarming installations, which warn humanity about the high levels of pollution caused by plastic products in our oceans world wide. The agglomerations of plastic goods looks like a colourful avalanche gushing into the room spreading everywhere and destroying the structure of the room.
Annegret Bleisteiner starts by transferring objects and situations of our everyday life into new associative contexts. In modern life we are everywhere confronted with an overabundance of things and possibilities. At first sight Annegret Bleisteiner’s installations appear to present an impossibly idyllic world stuffed with consumer goods, a world filled with images of the ideal, superfluous projections of must haves, provided to us by the commercial media. These objects and dispositions futilely seek to fill an inner emptiness, and by doing so reveal to us the absurdity of this material madness. By making use of objects that are found in our apparently safe and structured homes. Annegret Bleisteiner provides us much food for thought for rethinking our surroundings. Her drawings, collages, embroideries, installations, performances, and video artworks allow the viewer to be drawn into a space of personal experience that provides scope for a variety of emotions and impressions. As different as they might be, the works of Annegret Bleisteiner do have one principle in common: the superimposition and layering of space, time, and content. The concept of spatial layering is especially evident in the installations. The most obvious realization of “agglomerates” is the work “All I Have Ever Wished For,” a colorful, ceiling-high, meticulously and tenderly constructed hodge-podge. Composed of plastic objects from the commercial world, the installation follows a stringent order despite its flashy chaos. Topics such as recycling, sustainability, and ecological awareness are also in the center of her work. The installations do not exist independent of viewers, but require their mental participation. You have to closely approach the work to become immersed in the intimacy of others’ and also your own memorabilia, to be carried away for a moment by a fleeting nostalgia and feeling of recognition. Temporal layering is an essential characteristic of the video art-works. Such “layers of time” are exhibited by the moving images and the stills derived from them. Multilayered projections create a threedimensional perception of space and intensify the effect. Video artworks are also often incorporated in the installations (such as on a shelf or in a boat), inviting viewers to see those objects as a projection screen for the moving images, to ponder them and allow themselves to drift away with them. Even though the monotony and repetition of actions suggest a kind of certitude, new revelations can be discovered from a particular banality of the continual appearance and disappearance of images. The complexity of temporal layering involves overlays in content as well in the juxtaposition of opposites. The work “Intoxication” evokes the joyful atmosphere of the Oktoberfest, but also pain, by the second level of the video with its images of the bomb attack there in 1980. Many works are composed of real and surreal photographic images, where the factual layer is accompanied by a mental, often fantastical one. In her search for undetected dimensions, Annegret Bleisteiner is questioning the congruency of the inner world with the outer world.
