Solo Presentation at the Parallel Vienna / Otto-Wagner-Arena / September 2025
Galerie Rudolf Leeb | PARALLEL VIENNA at Otto Wagner Arena | Sept 10 – 14, 2025
Birgit Graschopf presents her latest body of work as a Chamber Play (Kammerspiel), orchestrating a dynamic interaction between the exhibition space, its specific lighting conditions, and the images themselves at this year’s PARALLEL VIENNA, inviting visitors to navigate a curated parcours.
The term Kammerspiel originates from the theater, describing intimate, often minimalist stagings that focus on the internal worlds of the protagonists and their psychological nuances. It is a format that dissolves the boundaries between image and spectator, creating an atmosphere of both confinement and profound intimacy. The artist presents mysterious, at times absurdly staged scenes that consistently center on female figures. These figures engage with the viewer in a manner that is as aloof as it is captivating; through their stage-like presence, they evoke gestures rooted in Romanticism and Surrealism. While the former seeks to project the inner, subconscious world onto the exterior—often through nature, or in Graschopf’s case, through architecture—the latter breaks with rational order to open up spaces for the irrational and the nonsensical.
With both playfulness and sophistication, the artist combines these stagings with carefully selected substrates and ingenious materials that dialogue with the pictorial motif: the shimmering surfaces of sandpaper heighten the mysterious aura of the figures, while the delicate bubbles on the surface of hand-cast concrete slabs merge with the exposed blackberry thickets, as if the image were transmitting coded messages…
Kammerspiel, toned and hand-colored photograph on watercolor paper
Photographs on sandpaper with varying grits and colors
Primosten, Silver gelatin print, hand-colored and varnished
Top left: Almost, Photograph on fiber cement, hand-colored
Top right: The Chamber’s Play, Photograph on hand-cast concrete, hand-colored
Monstrum, Photograph on hand-cast concrete, hand-colored
Untitled, toned Photograph on Watercolor Paper
Top left: Untitled, Photograph on fiber cement
Top right: Klara, Photograph on fiber cement, hand-colored and with gold pigment
Erice, toned Photograph on Watercolor paper
Untitled, Photograph on Sandpaper