BRIGITTE MAHLKNECHT – IN STATU NASCENDI

There’s a lot of whirling, gurgling and swelling… in Brigitte Mahlknecht’s paintings, drawings and photos. The observer comes face to face with an obstinate collection of changes and developments. Creations and series of luxuriant and lush figures personify hybrid existential forms. Lines, numbers, symbols and figures fleetingly fill the portrayed space, sowing germinal cells for further precarious reproduction. They are not illustrated stories but a utopian cartography, an endless repetition, in the vital space of urban memories, biologic visions and cosmic formulas. Brigitte Mahlknecht’s theme is life, depicted through temporary scenarios in its extraordinary fullness to arouse observations and remarks from ever-new points of view. The artist’s answer to shaky certainties and great probabilities is an open project, which explores, in an obstinately humorous way, the space between her very existence as an artist and the challenges of the world in search of the new.

In the show conceived for the Ar/ge Kunst Gallery Museum of Bolzano, Brigitte Mahlknecht’s works acquire a new space quality. Her paintings, drawings, photos and videos alternate with elements exhibited directly on the walls of the Gallery, creating an open, practical circuit. In this way the self-imposed border line snaps, and the scenario of signs spreads all over the Gallery walls.

Brigitte Mahlknecht was born in Bolzano in 1966. After attending the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, she lived for some time in New York and Berlin, and presently lives in Vienna. Her works have been exhibited in Salzburg, Bolzano, Vienna, Rovereto, Munich, Berlin, Genoa and Innsbruck. Furthermore, she has published several books in collaboration with writers such as Oswald Egger, Schuldt, Robert Kelly and Aage Hansen-Löve.