Hannes Brunner & Vicky Wright

Hannes Brunner and Vicky Wright's common interest is the question of the unknown and the known and forms of transition and transformation which they examine differently in their works. Inspired by Aristotle, "all men by nature desire to know" they explore this idea together in a new way. This philosophic attitude is kindled by our educational systems perhaps informing the popular adage, 'knowledge is power.' But whose? There is no doubt that the acquisition of knowledge involves a power differential, but what if knowledge itself is seen as too powerful because it threatens our psychic integrity? According to Zizek, there are known knowns. These are things, we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.“ There is a fourth category -the most dangerous one: the unknown knowns. Things of which we don’t know that we know them. In other wo rds subconsciousness, the "knowledge, which doesn’t know anything of itself“ as Lacan used to put it. […] or in other words the desire not to know.

Brunner casually places veneering and cardboard cut outs into the gallery which echo objects, like back walls of closets, frames of chimney board, folding tables, covers of flat screens or rips of corner bench. They seem like invitations for the next process of inquiry, where it occurs to Wright to create a painterly response to the forms that she imagines hidden (behind the work) in the floor and in the walls, a sort of shadow play evolves which opens a dialogic loop between the two artist’s activities as they respond to each new stage as the works unfolds into an formation in this temporal space.

Flattened forms by Hannes Brunner seem to be structures of modernism on the verge of collapse; they imply physical body which they aren’t. That is where the painting of Vicky Wright, like a skin of a film, offers a correspondence to extend the reality beyond a phantasmic fiction. Things turn upside down: suddenly the furnishing is not simply the base for the imaginative painting but rather the shield or the mask to hide it and within that it underlies an effect of truth. By oscillating between different states of essence, presumed reality and the phantasmic the installation unfolds a moment of uncanny distortion.

Hannes Brunner lives in Zürich and Berlin. He graduated with a Diploma in Fine Art at Kassel Art Academy and with a Masters in Architecture at the ETH Zürich. His art installations favor ephemeral materials, and his contextual art projects combine different medias including social process from digital communication into real physical spaces (www.hannesbrunner.com). Projects are shown internationally. Isometries, Alpineum, Luzern, Switzerland, 2012; Driver's Comment, Kunsthalle Arbon, Switzerland ,2011; Time Machines, Musée Centre PasquArt, CH, 2009; Search Engines Bodily Reply, Rotunda Gallery AUD Dubai UAE, 2008; Suburban Entity, Hillwood Art Museum LI, New York, USA 2003; 1site2places, Stadtgalerie Sindelfingen/Stuttgart, Germany 2000-09; One Life, One Mile:in Rome, Gwangju Biennale, South Korea and Kunstzeughaus, Switzerland, 1997/2010.

Vicky Wright lives in London. She graduated with a Masters in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 2008. Previous solo exhibitions include The Garments of the Dominators, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, UK, 2012; The Informants, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, UK,2010 and COMMA 14, Bloomberg SPACE, London, UK 2009. Recent group exhibitions include The Hecklers, New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK 2013; Paintings, Max Wigram Gallery, London, UK, 2012, Among Flesh, Alison Jacques Gallery, London, UK, 2011; Special Effects in Contemporary Art, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, Germany, 2010. Wright is currently artist in residence at LoBe, Berlin.

Hannes Brunner & Vicky Wright

artists:
Hannes Brunner, Vicky Wright

curators:
Elke Falat & Olivia Reynolds