Art Düsseldorf10.04.2025–13.04.2025Wolfgang Matuschek, Anna McCarthy, Anna Vogel
Art Düsseldorf 2025 with works on paper by Wolfgang Matuschek, Anna McCarthy and Anna Vogel in the new designated section of the fair. Find us at stand B04.1!
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Sketches and drawings holds a special place in the expanding artistic practice of musician, actor, performance and installation artist Anna McCarthy. Presenting works on newspaper and figurative drawings on paper from her recent two volume publications by Edition Taube, we try to shed a new light on the practice of one of Munich’s most unique artists.
About the two volume publication:
The first volume, ‘Trickles & Oozes’, is a collection of popular pencil drawings depicting melting figures. These figures trickle and ooze through various states of equilibrium – some appearing as self-contained fountains, clouds, or gusts of wind, while others form groups that seem to be planning something, communicating amidst pylons and mountain landscapes. With their large eyes and friendly, doughy, cloud-like appearance, they are both endearing and surreal.
The second volume, ‘The Hills Have Crazy Eyes – Woman in a Landscape’, is an assemblage of fragments of self-experience and quotations in German and English, told through the history of the perception of nature and mountaineering, accompanied by sketches, drawings and paintings made during McCarthy’s own mountaineering expeditions en plein air.
Anna McCarthy’s (*1981, lives and works in Munich) constantly seeks new forms to express topics that have collective relevancy as well as personal urgency. Her work is quick and dirty. Improvised and raw, charged with personal experience as a reflection of wider topics. Her sharp observation and wit challenge the status quo, always laughing, together with the viewer, in the face of fear. Her methods of production mirror the content – cheap materials, reusables, always in flux. She possesses a talent to astutely comment on societal ongoings whilst refraining from preaching, subtly dismantling power constructs as she goes. Her work is a modern-day amalgam of multilayered readings that take the viewer into a narration that weaves in and out of thought patterns in those similar to one’s own.
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Anna Vogel (*1981) creates photos or combinations of photography, drawing and print, thematically dealing with digital communication, nature, history and biology. The investigation of these topics is accompanied by a richly imaginative playing with the medium of photography that self confidently transcends the traditional borders of the genre. Vogel took some of the photographs on which her works are based herself; she found others online or created them digitally. Her subjects undergo a large number of analog and digital processes of image editing. She retouches certain visual elements or alters the pictorial composition. She makes use of traditional collage technique, expands the photographic space with the help of drafting tools and is not afraid to scratch the picture surface in a mechanical way. Upon a small space, with often succinct means, and without clearly revealing what exactly is being shown, Vogel’s works achieve an astounding auratic impact while setting in motion perceptual irritations and doubt. They show a world, which remains in the realms of vagueness. Landscapes that seem somehow familiar, but then again not. Settings that are known from somewhere, but nonetheless remain foreign, conveying a melancholic energy that oscillates between desire and discomfort.
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Wolfgang Matuschek creates wonderfully imaginative drawings of fantastic geometries, often near monochrome but with such rich depth of color as to make them feel real nonetheless. Many of his drawings engage with the notion of spatial framing, with unconventional perspectives, comic book style bordering, and foreground obstruction or cropping of the central image all confronting the viewer with the artifice of his otherwise bewitching worlds.
Born in Vienna in 1989, Wolfgang Matuschek studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology (2015), Sculpture at Escola Superior de Belas do Porto (2016), and painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2018). Recent solo and group exhibitions include KAI 10 Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf (2024), ROH Projects, Jakarta (2024), Crèvecœur, Paris (2023), Harkawik, New York (2022), ACK, Kyoto (2022), soft power, Berlin (2022), Hoast, Vienna (2021), Gomo, Vienna (2020), 4649, Tokyo (2019), Berlinskej Model, Prag (2019), White Dwarf Projects, Vienna (2018), Palacete Pinto Leite, Porto (2016).
