Brigitte Waldach
The Café at the Amerika Haus is an integral part of the spatial concept developed by C/O Berlin for its exhibition center. With an entrance foyer facing out onto Hardenbergstraße, it is a stage teeming with life, where visitors become both actors and spectators. Independent of its exhibitions of photography, C/O Berlin presents artistic works in the Café that enter into dialog with the unique spatial situation as art-in-architecture. Following the installations by Michail Pirgelis (2015) and Karsten Konrad (2016), Brigitte Waldach will be the third artist to continue this tradition, presenting her work “From the inside to the outermost” starting 18 February 2017.
Letters, writings, and word fragments cluster together to form elongated clouds and imaginary landscapes. Individual words are highlighted in red and connected by long red elastic bands that lead to a vanishing point at the end of the room. As “text within text”, signal words shine out, triggering personal associations in the viewer. Artist Brigitte Waldach’s work describes a general perception and individual appropriation of the world; it revolves around perspectives and interpretations of landscapes and people.
The installation, which Waldach developed specifically for the Café at C/O Berlin, accentuates and transcends the space itself, making it a kind of three-dimensional linguistic system. She quotes passages from Peter Handke’s story “The Afternoon of a Writer”, breaks the text up into fragments and in some cases reformulates it completely, creating a textual matrix on the walls of the café and its wall-to-wall windows. What we read tells of an interim period, a passage from (the author’s) private space into the city and beyond, from the center to the periphery, in short: a path from inner to outer.
Brigitte Waldach (b. 1966 in Berlin) studied German and later Fine Art and Painting with Georg Baselitz, becoming his Meisterschülerin (master student) in 2000. After traveling to New York on a grant from the DAAD, she gained international notoriety for her large-format drawings, spatial drawings, and site-specific installations on controversial and existential topics such as terrorism (RAF), pathos, violence, love, and fear. Her works are in numerous public collections including the Albertina (Vienna), Aros Kunstmuseum, Berlinische Galerie, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Museum Kunstpalast (Düsseldorf), and Kunstmuseum Stavanger.