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Brigitte Waldach (2016). Photography by Mart Engelen

Brigitte Waldach (*1966 in Berlin) is a German visual artist working with drawing, text, installation, and sound.

Life

She studied art history and art education at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1991 to 1993. During this time, she also studied German language and literature at the Technical University of Berlin, until 1996.

She went on to study fine arts and painting in the class of Georg Baselitz at the University of the Arts, where she graduated in 2000 with honors as a master student.

In 2000, she was awarded a fellowship for young talents that included a residency in New York City. This was followed in 2001 by a travel scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), also for New York. In 2004, she received a project grant from the Berlin Senate. In 2007, she had a travel grant to São Paulo, Brazil by the German Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa). Brigitte Waldach lives and works in Berlin.

Work

Brigitte Waldach creates large-format drawings and site-specific installations. Her art explores mythologies and contemporary history, addressing existential themes and controversial issues such as terrorism, religion, pathos, violence, love, and fear. Waldach has artistically engaged with the phenomenon of political radicalization in post-war Germany, such as the Red Army Faction (RAF) and the related "German Autumn" of terror. Political and religious symbols often appear in her works; in her examination of issues the Berlin artist goes beyond the private sphere.

She also frequently uses the color red, which is associated with emotions such as love and anger, as well as political connotations such as revolution. The artist deals with the notion of space in different ways: as a two-dimensional pictorial space, as the space of a landscape, and as three-dimensional spatial drawings.

Waldach’s background in German studies and intellectual history is reflected in her artistic work, such as her use of texts by the likes of Hannah Arendt, Heiner Müller, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Foster Wallace, or Slavoj Žižek. "When I read, I see pictures, and when I draw, I see texts. I cannot conceive of one realm without the other," says the artist. In her work, literary quotations are densified into cloud-like formations. Waldach thus draws her motifs with lines and words. In her multidimensional spatial drawings, in which linear forms and figuration are replaced by meter-long red, black, or white elastic bands, texts also play a central role as spoken words, i.e. as sound. In the realization of such works she has collaborated with artists from other disciplines, such as German actress Fritzi Haberlandt.

Drawings

Brigitte Waldach, Zeit/Raum ´45 (John Cage), 2016, 146 × 140 cm / Photo: Bernd Borchardt

The figures and landscape motifs in Brigitte Waldach’s drawings are often surrounded by differently shaded texts. She draws large-format, often multi-part pictures in which lines and writing combine to form a complex motif. Her gouache, graphite, and pigment pen drawings in red and grey tones are made on handmade paper. With her scenes of trees, mountains, and outer space, she redefines the contemporary landscape.

Her series “History – Now” (2016) reflects on the question of what a modern encyclopedia could look like today, depicting historiography as a dynamic process. It expresses her interest in the basic democratic idea of co-writing and re-writing history on Wikipedia. Her research for this work led her to identify Jesus, National Socialism, and terrorism as the most discussed topics and most frequently revised articles in this online encyclopedia. With her drawing sequence, Waldach suspends the lively writing process and flow of Wikipedia and transfers it to a traditional artistic medium. Her “History – Now” drawings use various shades of gray to render visible the historical development and many versions of each encyclopedic entry. Waldach then adds her own texts and original quotations by the selected persons in her drawings, thereby creating a kind of contemporary history painting.

In 2014, Brigitte Waldach was invited by the lithography studio, Edition Copenhagen, to create her own lithographic edition; the result included a ten-part series on the "Ten Commandments". Past participants include Antony Gormley, Katharina Grosse, William Kentridge, Imi Knoebel, Katharina Sieverding, Luc Tuymans, and Günther Uecker.

Spatial drawings

In addition to her drawings on paper, Brigitte Waldach has produced expansive installations in museums and galleries since 2007. Depending on the context, they include stretched rubber bands, wall drawings and texts, sound, and light. In her spatial drawings, she detaches the line from its two-dimensionality and continues the drawing into space with the help of elastic rubber bands. Exhibition visitors can move freely through the spatial drawing and experience the physical space anew, as image and perspective change with every step.

The artist has created spatial drawings and site-specific installations at art institutions such as the Berlinische Galerie (2007), Kunsthalle Emden (2010)[ak1] , the Kunstraum of the German Bundestag (2012), and MARTa Herford (2013), all in Germany; at MUST in Stavanger, Norway (2011), and at galleries and art fairs around the world.

The director of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Gregor Jansen, noted in a catalogue: "In her spatial drawings, things can even be seen with closed eyes – images from the symbolic world of sound, an acoustic spatial drawing, a radical illusion. A space for narrative(s) and a leaning towards a Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of the arts!? Ultimately, Waldach opens up a new iconography of time between film, image, symbol, and language as a symbolic mediation of the inner world in the drawing."

Art in architecture

In 2017, Brigitte Waldach created the work "From the Inside to the Outermost" for the café at C/O Berlin, an exhibition space in Berlin. Letters, writings, and word fragments cluster together into elongated clouds and imaginary landscapes. Individual words are highlighted in red and connected by long red elastic bands that lead to a vanishing point at the end of the room. Signal words stand out like a text within the text, triggering viewers’ own personal associations. Passages from the story "The Afternoon of a Writer" by Peter Handke are quoted, fragmented, and reformulated, creating a textual matrix on the walls of the café along its window front.

For the new main building of the Sparkasse Allgäu bank in Kempten in 2017, Waldach realized the art-in-architecture project "Die Innenwelt der Aussenwelt" (English: "The Inner World of the Outer World"). Here, too, she used literary texts, which extend over some 200 glass partitions on the four floors of the building. Excerpts from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heiner Müller, Durs Grünbein, and Peter Handke can be found on the glass walls in the publicly accessible areas as well as in conference rooms and offices. For the artist, the project involves fundamental questions, such as: Can art in architecture transform the character of a building into poetry? Can it transcend the function of a space? And how do images, words, and literary texts affect us when they become part of our everyday environment?

Works in public collections

Brigitte Waldach's works can be found in numerous public collections, including the Albertina in Vienna, Altana Cultural Foundation, Bad Homburg; ARoS art museum, Aarhus, Denmark; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Fondation Francès, Paris; Kunsthalle Emden; Kunsthalle Kiel; Kupferstichkabinett of the National Museums in Berlin; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Artothek), Berlin; MUST, Stavanger, Norway; Moritzburg Foundation, Halle; Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf; as well as private and corporate collections around the world.

Monographs (selection)

• Brigitte Waldach. Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt, Jovis, Berlin 2017
• Brigitte Waldach. Der Mythos ist eine Maschine, Texte zur Welt, Kiel 2017
• Brigitte Waldach. Bleierne Zeit / Leaden Time (published by Gallery Bo Bjerggaard, Kopenhagen; Galerie CONRADS, Dusseldorf, Distanz, Berlin 2013
• Edition 5 der Berliner Festspiele (with a text by David Foster Wallace), Berlin 2012
• Brigitte Waldach. Sturz / Fall (published by Kunsthalle Emden) Kehrer, Heidelberg 2010
• Brigitte Waldach. Trailer (Kehrer, Heidelberg 2007

External link

• http://waldach.com/