About the exhibition:

Elisabeth von Samsonow

Museum des Anfangs (Museum of Beginnings)

1–31 October 2022, 9 am – 5 pm

Opening: 30 September, 11 am

Melk Abbey, abbey park and pavilion

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Elisabeth von Samsonow presents a two-part installation of sculptures, objects and pictures that she composed for the pavilion – for her “Museum of Beginnings”. The sculptures in lime wood and metal take up the language of the Neolithic small sculptures of the Cyclades, whose futuristic forms had already inspired Hans Arp and Constantin Brancusi. So at the beginning of modern art stood prehistoric girls – what a story. Elisabeth von Samsonow spins this thread further with her sculptures, drawing more strongly than her predecessors on the content of these figures. She projects the abbreviated heads, arms and legs of the Cycladic figures into considerably larger volumes and emphasises the fact that these are figures of girls – a fact she underlines as not to be overlooked. For the first time, Elisabeth von Samsonow shows the work “Two Girls”. The pair of aluminium casts, 210 cm high, forms the centre of the exhibition in the baroque pavilion with its Bergl frescoes. Samsonow contrasts this colourful imagination of nature with metal casting. The artist develops her characteristic formal language in a new material: she transforms her richly coloured sculptural work with the grown tree trunk into a monochrome pair that radiates the dignity and power of the “girls” with great clarity.

A thirteen-part spiral folding screen encloses the sculpture of an ear of wheat, which for Elisabeth von Samsonow must be related to the logic of the girl figurines: the girl's body is the living coin; the Cycladic figurine that quotes the girl's body is a first “money” in which the elementary unit of value is established. The first unit of value is the body that produces bodies, as the one that sustains life (there are mothers in every species). This order runs completely counter to the order of capitalist value production – which particularly interests Samsonow.

Samsonow's girls are flanked by cult wagons – mobile platforms bearing sheet-metal silhouettes painted in white car paint. These cult wagons show a kind of archive of prehistoric sculpture and its preferred forms.

The group of girls is expanded by the “Transplants”, sculptures depicting hybrid beings between human and tree; a sounding sculpture with blackbird song; a white Demeter in the form of a female figure with a horse's head; a “Madonna”; a very large violin with cavities; and finally a “Weather Witch” of painted wood and iron. Three pictures on metal “altars” come from the series “Earth Souls”. They are intended to show the interweaving of the outer with the “inner earth”. By the inner earth, Elisabeth von Samsonow means the earth's own subjective, that is, psychic activity, which she records experimentally. The works selected for Melk (The Invention of Birdsong, The Creation of the Edelweiss, What Lies Beneath the Sleeping Witch) are meant to form a visual and fantastical bridge between the installation and the frescoes by Johann Bergl. (Publication on the Earth Souls: SPEAKING EARTH CATALOGUE, Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tirol, ed. Nina Tabassomi.) A smaller screen shows a video of a performance Elisabeth von Samsonow produced for Vienna Art Week 2020, entitled “The Great Ultimate Matriarcho-Magical State Ritual. The Total Formula”. In it, Elisabeth von Samsonow explains the basic concepts of a matriarchal politics. Samsonow identifies the turn away from matriarchal ways of life as the cause of our exploitative relationship with the biosphere and its crisis-ridden consequences, and counters it with an image of abundance and care.

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