Andrea Winkler

Set pieces of an everyday world becoming rapidly more unstable; this is the starting point for Andrea Winkler’s work. Crime scenes are cordoned off by the police, safety barriers block accident sites, stanchions guide visitors through museums – all of them devices intended to keep us, as a rule, from approaching things, places or valuable goods. Andrea Winkler stages defamiliarised reappearances of these set pieces, which suggest order and security, in an everyday world that is becoming rapidly more unstable. She translates these barrier devices very precisely into three-dimensional, complex and walk-in collages that invariably also transform the surrounding architecture and the rest of the exhibition situation into a precarious scenario worth questioning. In addition, alongside the barriers she places seemingly marginal objects that interact with the space and the forces at work in it, trigger strong emotions and evoke deviations from the everyday world. That the constellations of motifs themselves already represent deviations from the normal case, or indeed accidents, intensifies the artist’s strategy. Andrea Winkler constructs a „double bind“: on the one hand the situations appear as a mere image or mimetic model of reality which, as art, is devoid of any real function; on the other hand the works refer to a real aesthetic system that forms a place with genuine social regulations. Through its texts and through the intensive and at times humorous conversation with the artist, the present book illuminates her aesthetically disturbing oeuvre, unsettling in its chaos.

Exhibition:
Galerie im Turm, Berlin, 17/3 – 30/4/2017