Hausergallery announces the first exhibition by Isabelle Wenzel in Switzerland.
Isabelle Wenzel asks herself: “Who am I? What is the object and what relationship do we have to each other?“
She confronts the visitor with partly surreal and partly dynamic studies of the human body. They show cropped sections of a performance created especially for the camera. Her main emphasis is on the photographs‘ performative and sculptural aspects. The result is images that depict an explicitly created and staged world in which Wenzel takes the stage as photographer, model, sculpture and, in the final instance, as viewer, too. All three levels meld here into one new medium.
As a voyeur, one immerses oneself in a world replete in emotions and questions. Wenzel coquettishly presents the sexualized sexuality of her objects to the public eye and thus tempts us into an extravagant tête-à-tête. In the process, the contorted bodies give rise to a sculptural world in which there is no reference at all to the issue of person or personality. Some images reveal a cynical touch of the sit-com, such that you can readily encounter yourself in them. Spontaneity, movement and color are in this way interwoven, round each other out or engender new elements of tension. Wenzel‘s worlds offer us new perspectives and angles thanks to which you soon forget the natural and physical world order. Within the space of 10 seconds she grants us a fleeting glance at memories of something that went before, thus giving the image the scope to represent its or your own imagined reality. By doing so she succeeds in offering the viewer the greatest possible freedom of association.
Graziella Kuhn
Isabelle Wenzel (*1982, Wuppertal) lives and works in Amsterdam. She studied photography from 2008 – 2010 at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademy in Amsterdam. Since then she received several grants like
the European Photo Exhibition Award from the Körber-Stiftung Hamburg in 2011 and from the Mondriaan Fonds in 2013 amongst others. Her work has been exhibited in national and international solo and group shows and will be now shown for the first time in Switzerland.
Isabelle Wenzel: 10 Seconds
21 June – 27 July 2013
Hausergallery
Pflanzschulstrasse 17
CH-8004 Zürich
Switzerland
T +41 43 243 86 06
M+41 79 405 67 04
[email protected]
Opening hours: Wed – Fri 14:00 -18:00, Sat 13:00 – 16:00
