Exhibition: Sophie von Hellermann "Get Your Head Around It"

Exhibition: Sophie von Hellermann "Get Your Head Around It"

08.11. to 29.03.

Opening: Tue 07.10., 19h

Sophie von Hellermann (b. 1975, Munich) has created an extensive new work on canvas for the 62-metre vitrine on the south-west wall of the Kunsthalle’s building. Von Hellermann’s paintings quote fact and fiction, drawing diversely from history and culture to develop expansive, narrative compositions. Using broad-brushes to apply acrylic and raw pigment on unprimed canvas, her images are imbued with a luminosity and a sense of movement and weightlessness that contributes to their fleeting, dream-like or cinematic quality.

"Get Your Head Around It" pays tribute to the writer, cybernetician, language theorist and musician Oswald Wiener (b. 1935, Vienna; d. 2021, Steiermark) with whom von Hellermann studied "Erkenntnistheorie" (epistemology) while at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1990s. The work is inspired by a conversation between the artist and her tutor, referring to Wiener’s theory that the mind functions like a machine processing mental imagery in programmed sequences that guide the movement of "signs" or information.

Von Hellermann’s commission combines subjects from natural sciences with references to the history of philosophy and culture informed in part by the work’s proximity to institutions such as Vienna’s Naturhistorisches Museum (Natural History Museum). Images of planets, the sun, moon and stars are accompanied by a proliferation of animals including deer, horses, birds and dolphins. A pair of black and white swans make a passing reference to the Viennese philosopher Karl Popper and his theory of Kritischer Rationalismus while other motifs include the Baum der Erkenntnis (Tree of Knowledge); the cave paintings at Lascaux and Plato’s speleological allegory.

Sophie von Hellermann also supports the Kunsthalle Wien's edition series with 13 unique watercolours.