Opening Friday 26 April 2019
Exhibition from 27 April – 6 July 2019

Three years after her first show at BQ Gallery, Raphaela Vogel summons a tight-knit labyrinth of fear that marks a retrospective vision and as well as a sense of sombre foreboding. Three rooms combine the media of sound collage, sculpture, video and painting into a surreal odyssey that descends into the dark sides of the career dream. Key elements from previous exhibitions return as a collection of assembled fragments that are unleashed in upgraded forms.

The one most feared among her species, the bird spider, takes us hostage amidst her eight cool tentacles and an arachidic visual body. Hypnotized by spiralling vortexes and lulled to sleep by the soft vibration of a cantilever chair, we witness how Raphaela Vogel drives her own body of work through the turbine blades of a ship propeller – until only rags and bits remain of it. Creation and regression in a designed living room, accompanied by siren-like sounds.
An extremely potent birthing machine, consisting of the martial bits and bobs of an incessant event and performance culture. She attacks us from all sides with female role models. In the claustrophobic arena, the mother ship fights until the final knock out.

The artist does not only confront herself but rather the entire art world with its incarnated phobias: the fear of a loss of self and a state of exhaustion in the face of a continuously turning spiral of production and a multitude of social expectations how a female artist should be. At the same time, this also describes the search for a safe space within the all-devouring economy of visibility.

After numerous institutional solo exhibitions, most recently at Kunsthalle Basel (2017), Raphaela Vogel’s work is currently on view at Haus der Kunst in Munich and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin. This coming October she presents new works at Kunsthaus Bregenz.

BQ
Weydingerstrasse 10
10178 Berlin