In June 2023, Vienna's BURN-IN Gallery invites art and literature lovers to the subtle exhibition Flowers do not bleed . Here Ellen Semen's independent painting meets Kirstin Breitenfellner's stirring poems. This successful symbiosis of images and words creates a provocative atmosphere around the themes of war and mortality in the atypical art spaces. For Breitenfellner, war and the finitude of human life are among its "mortality weights." "But death is also a constituent of life. It unites people by simultaneously dividing them, just as war does. Death, too, drives humanity before it through the fear it gives birth to. War is the elixir of death. But death is also the elixir of life. A paradox," Breitenfellner says of her poems.
These are precisely the themes Semen addressed nearly 20 years ago in the work cycle Floral Militancy. Floral and warlike mix here to the color-explosive symbiosis. The superficially positive-looking figurative painting suddenly gains access to the viewer's mind with idyllic scenes of nature. Yet her protagonists seem full of aggression and deviousness. Semen's pictorial surface as the scene of war remains, sometimes very concrete, sometimes hidden and subliminally staged, always embedded in the living and power space of nature.
Flowers do not bleed. They bloom, their buds open, their colors and fragrances unfold. Their delicate petals, caressed by a breath of life, open to the world, revealing their deepest essence and reminding us of our own transience. They reveal to us a truth that we sometimes try to suppress.
Ellen Semen and Kirstin Breitenfellner give visitors wonderful moments of pause with the exhibition.
The exhibition was curated by BURN-IN founder Sonja Dolzer.
Vernissage & Program
BURN-IN invites you to the exhibition opening on 28.06.2023, 17-19 h.
Location
BURN-IN Gallery at Gerngross 2. OG | 1070 Vienna, Mariahilfer Straße 42-48
#ArtTRANSFER
The art of expression: When Literature and Painting Create New Worlds Together
Ellen Semen introduced author Kirstin Breitenfellner to me a few months ago as part of our exhibition SuperCyber[wo]man. Soon after, the delightful idea of merging Semen's painting with Breitenfellner's poetry emerged - project title: we live and then we are dead. For me, at first glance, a "no na" statement, the depth of which one recognizes only upon closer inspection. An important parallel to Semen's work emerges. Here, too, the viewer gets a sense of what is being shown through the gradual decoding of the image's content. The temporal aspect of creation does not seem to play a role in the harmonious duality of painting and poetry. The themes still have startling relevance after almost two decades. Breitenfellner's 17 poems correspond subliminally with Semen's works from the cycle Floral Militancy. For me as a gallerist and curator, they offer the delightful challenge of developing a wonderful exhibition project with great depth that provides our visitors with a sensitive multisensory approach to the themes of war, peace, life, death, transience, humanity, nature, and culture. Focus themes for BURN-IN since the beginning.
Semen and Breitenfellner tread new ground for them with the dialogue presented. But the interactions of poetry and visual art have a long tradition, beginning in antiquity. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke created painting poems, in contemporary poetry Jan Wagner, Marion Poschmann or Thomas Kling should be mentioned. There were direct collaborations in the Viennese art scene, for example, between Friederike Mayröcker and Maria Lassnig or Linde Waber and of Ida von Szigethy with Konrad Bayer, Barbara Frischmuth or Margaret Kreidl.
Look forward to this extraordinary show! The atypical art space in the Gerngross forms a wonderful setting and subliminally sensitizes additional audience layers away from the classical art channels - keyword democratization of art.
