Susan Philipsz, Vernebelt IV, 2016
Scottish born Susan Philipsz' work revolves around melancholic existentialism and explorations of the human voice. She became well-known through a capella renditions of songs. For the Glasgow International Festival she developed Lowlands, after a ballad from the 16th century, which was later recreated at Tate Britain in London, where it won her the prestigious Turner Prize (2010).
Phillips is now showing at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Night and Fog, 30 January until 3 April 2016. The point of departure for her current project for Kunsthaus Bregenz is Peter Zumthor’s architecture, an illuminated structure, together with the lake and the fog that is typical of the town. Fog as a metaphor was also the source of the title for the 1955 French documentary Night and Fog by Alain Resnais reconstructing the deportations to Auschwitz and Majdanek. Philipsz has deconstructed Hanns Eisler’s soundtrack for the film into the individual voices of the instruments. Isolated and removed from the overall composition, their timbres fill the seemingly archaic spaces of the Kunsthaus with an almost sculptural presence.
The artist’s breath, condensed on a glass panel, seizes upon issues central to the exhibition: night and fog, concealment and transparency, breathing as the epitome of being alive, its absence an indication of the arrival of death. In her three-part series of works »Vernebelt«, which is the most recent work on display in the exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Philipsz makes the essence of breathing, the breath, visible in mysterious figural form.
Medium: Colour photograph mounted on aluminum composite panel and behind glass with mounting fixation
Size: 33 x 50 cm
Edition of 40 + 5 A.P.
signed and numbered
Price: €1.800 (including 10% VAT)
This Susan Philipsz edition is available at Kunsthaus Bregenz
