Curly Wavy Flat
Paper, digital print
Exhibited at Kunst im Traklhaus, Salzburg (AT), as part of Rar & Bizarr, an exhibition initiated and organized by Salzburg Museum. 21.02.2025–03.05.2025
For this exhibition, artists took on the role of curators by selecting an object from the museum’s collection—specifically, from a set of particularly curious preselected items. Each artist was then asked to create a response to their chosen piece.
I selected an 18th-century painting showing a Dreigesicht by an unknown artist. The artwork presents an almost psychedelic and overwhelming depiction of a face, intended to illustrate the abstract concept of the Christian Trinity. The idea of a triune deity appears across various mythologies, and Dante’s Divine Comedy even describes Lucifer as having three faces. This imagery was controversial—so much so that Pope Urban VIII banned three-faced depictions in 1628, rendering this painting illegal at the time of its creation.
Perhaps the number three holds significance because it forms the simplest possible group, making it an ideal structure for societal concepts. The triangle frequently serves as a model, in such different fields as couples therapy, corporate coaching, work-life balance frameworks, and Christian representations of the Trinity. These visual structures are used to express belief systems and social constructs, raising questions about who defines these structures, how they shape society, and when they gain significance. Ultimately, such models reflect an ongoing, ideological and intentional effort to explain the world.
Participating artists:
Magdalena Berger, Gertrud Fischbacher, Manfred Grübl, Ursula Guttmann, Tina Hainschwang, Theresa Hattinger, Marianne Lang, David Moises
Special thanks to:
Martina Berger-Klingler (Kunst im Traklhaus)
Christian Flandera, curator (Salzburg Museum)
Photos © Salzburg Museum/Maurice Rigaud
Paper, digital print
Exhibited at Kunst im Traklhaus, Salzburg (AT), as part of Rar & Bizarr, an exhibition initiated and organized by Salzburg Museum. 21.02.2025–03.05.2025
For this exhibition, artists took on the role of curators by selecting an object from the museum’s collection—specifically, from a set of particularly curious preselected items. Each artist was then asked to create a response to their chosen piece.
I selected an 18th-century painting showing a Dreigesicht by an unknown artist. The artwork presents an almost psychedelic and overwhelming depiction of a face, intended to illustrate the abstract concept of the Christian Trinity. The idea of a triune deity appears across various mythologies, and Dante’s Divine Comedy even describes Lucifer as having three faces. This imagery was controversial—so much so that Pope Urban VIII banned three-faced depictions in 1628, rendering this painting illegal at the time of its creation.
Perhaps the number three holds significance because it forms the simplest possible group, making it an ideal structure for societal concepts. The triangle frequently serves as a model, in such different fields as couples therapy, corporate coaching, work-life balance frameworks, and Christian representations of the Trinity. These visual structures are used to express belief systems and social constructs, raising questions about who defines these structures, how they shape society, and when they gain significance. Ultimately, such models reflect an ongoing, ideological and intentional effort to explain the world.
Participating artists:
Magdalena Berger, Gertrud Fischbacher, Manfred Grübl, Ursula Guttmann, Tina Hainschwang, Theresa Hattinger, Marianne Lang, David Moises
Special thanks to:
Martina Berger-Klingler (Kunst im Traklhaus)
Christian Flandera, curator (Salzburg Museum)
Photos © Salzburg Museum/Maurice Rigaud
Martin Grabner:
“The traces of use on the reflective work clothes are proof of the hard labour that has to be done every single day to make our lives comfortable possible: the shipping of ever more goods to our homes, the disposal of the waste this creates, as well as the ‘just-in-time’ deliveries to large manufacturing plants. All of this requires vast and continuously expanding transhipment centres and warehouses at major transport hubs. Despite ‘Logistics 4.0’, this work is still performed by people.
“The traces of use on the reflective work clothes are proof of the hard labour that has to be done every single day to make our lives comfortable possible: the shipping of ever more goods to our homes, the disposal of the waste this creates, as well as the ‘just-in-time’ deliveries to large manufacturing plants. All of this requires vast and continuously expanding transhipment centres and warehouses at major transport hubs. Despite ‘Logistics 4.0’, this work is still performed by people.
For these people, the apparent non-places on the periphery constitute living environments charged with meaning and (hi)stories. The installation made from Pro Line HighVis workwear, which is highly visible for safety reasons, counteracts the invisibility they experience as a result of their workplaces being pushed out of the cities. From the individual narratives, the artists/researchers produce a cartography of the experiences of migration and mobility that emerges from the milieu of endless logistics landscapes without which our cities could not exist.”