INSIDEOUT
#1 Raphaela Vogel
1.–25. February 2021
Curated by Gesine Borcherdt
INSIDEOUT is the new exhibition series, where the curators Gesine Borcherdt and Dr. Julia Wirxel successively occupy from February to April the display window of the Kunsthalle Gießen with monthly changing artistic positions. With this new format, the Kunsthalle is responding to the current, pandemic-related closings of cultural institutions. INSIDEOUT carries the art from the closed interior to the exterior, thus enabling visitors to continue to see current art.
White silicone that looks like flash-frozen bodily fluids. Animal skins stretched on the wall that look like splayed wings or pubic triangles: Raphaela Vogel’s (born 1988 in Nuremberg, lives and works in Berlin) installations appeal to all the senses. They are brash and demanding, dreamy and intense, humorous and melancholic, contradictory and provocative. Many of the works relate to animals – the artist grew up in the countryside – toys, myths and pop music recur, as does the artist herself. With her hypnotic-archaic work, she is one of the most important young German artists who has lent art a whole new feminist visual language.
For INSIDEOUT in the display window of the Kunsthalle Gießen, Raphaela Vogel will erect a series of ‘Uris’: white silicone casts of free-standing urinals like the kind used on beaches or at festivals. The curious, skeleton-like forms look as if they were just dutifully standing in line awaiting their turn. Despite their expressive appearance, they are almost identical and display no significantly individual signature – their figures were formed solely from material that Vogel let flow down the side of the urinals.
There is a huge painted collage of moose and horse skins on the wall above them. ‘Der Zahn’, in its pointed form, is reminiscent of the root of a tooth, but above all it adopts a form that appears again and again in Raphaela Vogel’s work: the triangle. Contrasting most strongly with the virile rectangle that dominates most architecture, it contains a metaphor that especially catches the eye in INSIDEOUT: Like a pubic triangle, it dominates the wall as a giant female genital that is at the same time an abstract painting. Thus Vogel alludes to a discipline that is particularly representative of masculine art history. The artist painted on leather from early on, gaining a new freedom from the preloaded canvas, all the more so as animal skins already carried meaning.
Raphaela Vogel’s work is distinguished by this obscure physicality. Combined with the latest materials and techniques, which nevertheless always retain something fragile, narratives emerge in a very unique, dystopian visual language – full of astuteness, symbolic power and humour that extends far beyond the zeitgeist of our digital era.
Raphaela Vogel lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Nuremberg Art Academy and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Her most recent solo exhibitions were held, among others, at the Neues Museum Nürnberg (2020), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2019), Haus der Kunst Munich (2020), Berlinische Galerie (2018) and Kunsthalle Basel (2018). She has also participated in the group exhibitions DREAM BABY DREAM at Haus Mödrath, Kerpen (2020), Mythologies – The Beginning and End of Civilizations in Aarhus (2020), Game of Drones at the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen (2019) and Jeunes Artistes en Europe at the Fondation Cartier in Paris (2019), among others.
Gesine Borcherdt is an art journalist and curator living in Berlin. She is a writer for Welt, Welt am Sonntag, BLAU International and AD Germany and was senior editor of the art magazine BLAU. She was the curator at the Capri art space in Düsseldorf from 2014–2019. In 2020, she curated the exhibition DREAM BABY DREAM at Haus Mödrath in Kerpen. She is currently working on an interview book with VALIE EXPORT.
For INSIDEOUT in the display window of the Kunsthalle Gießen, Raphaela Vogel will erect a series of ‘Uris’: white silicone casts of free-standing urinals like the kind used on beaches or at festivals. The curious, skeleton-like forms look as if they were just dutifully standing in line awaiting their turn. Despite their expressive appearance, they are almost identical and display no significantly individual signature – their figures were formed solely from material that Vogel let flow down the side of the urinals.
There is a huge painted collage of moose and horse skins on the wall above them. ‘Der Zahn’, in its pointed form, is reminiscent of the root of a tooth, but above all it adopts a form that appears again and again in Raphaela Vogel’s work: the triangle. Contrasting most strongly with the virile rectangle that dominates most architecture, it contains a metaphor that especially catches the eye in INSIDEOUT: Like a pubic triangle, it dominates the wall as a giant female genital that is at the same time an abstract painting. Thus Vogel alludes to a discipline that is particularly representative of masculine art history. The artist painted on leather from early on, gaining a new freedom from the preloaded canvas, all the more so as animal skins already carried meaning.
Raphaela Vogel’s work is distinguished by this obscure physicality. Combined with the latest materials and techniques, which nevertheless always retain something fragile, narratives emerge in a very unique, dystopian visual language – full of astuteness, symbolic power and humour that extends far beyond the zeitgeist of our digital era.
Raphaela Vogel lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Nuremberg Art Academy and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Her most recent solo exhibitions were held, among others, at the Neues Museum Nürnberg (2020), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2019), Haus der Kunst Munich (2020), Berlinische Galerie (2018) and Kunsthalle Basel (2018). She has also participated in the group exhibitions DREAM BABY DREAM at Haus Mödrath, Kerpen (2020), Mythologies – The Beginning and End of Civilizations in Aarhus (2020), Game of Drones at the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen (2019) and Jeunes Artistes en Europe at the Fondation Cartier in Paris (2019), among others.
Gesine Borcherdt is an art journalist and curator living in Berlin. She is a writer for Welt, Welt am Sonntag, BLAU International and AD Germany and was senior editor of the art magazine BLAU. She was the curator at the Capri art space in Düsseldorf from 2014–2019. In 2020, she curated the exhibition DREAM BABY DREAM at Haus Mödrath in Kerpen. She is currently working on an interview book with VALIE EXPORT.