Galerie Ron Mandos is proud to present the exhibition by Brigitte Kowanz (1957 – 2022) Another Time Another Place Another Place Another Time. Kowanz embraced light as her primary artistic medium, exploring its diverse qualities and manifestations through objects, installations, spatial interventions, and expansive environments. Utilizing illuminants like neon, LED, and fluorescent cables, Kowanz’s works from the 1980s onwards delved into the intricate relationship between light and space. Her art allows viewers to perceive light as a distinct phenomenon, as a medium for conveying information and as the very guarantor of information itself. The exhibition can be seen from 20 January through 25 February, 2024.
''I encounter light as an autonomous medium. But what is light? Light makes everything visible, yet itself remains invisible. Light is language. Light is a code. Light is information. Light is what we see. Everything we see and know, we know through light. Through my installations, I am trying to make light itself visible and conceivable.” – Brigitte Kowanz.
Her light sculptures, infused with poetic meaning, often incorporate handwritten texts or codes. Another Place Another Time (2000), for instance, features a square acrylic glass panel illuminated by fluorescent tubes. The work’s title is materialized in the acrylic panel through a laser cutting procedure that plastically renders the words in Morse Code. This installation fills its surroundings with a cool, blue-toned light, redefining the relationship between the artwork, its viewers and the environment they are both situated in. In this chain of perceptual dependency, the work consistently constructs new spaces and temporalities, always anchored in the coincidental. This aleatory and ephemeral character is also a material element of the work itself, present in the unforeseen trace of the electrostatic charge left after the removal of the protection foil that initially covered the acrylic surface. Kowanz captured this unique and almost painterly moment through a fixating layer of varnish, thus materializing the immaterial. In addition, the piece invokes the feeling of being transported to another place in another time, implying a sense of nostalgia and need for an escape, akin to immersing oneself in the virtual realms of the internet.