© Mari Kracikova

© Simon Veres

Judith Fegerl: Silent Machines

Exhibition in the pavilion of the Melk Abbey park

12–31 October 2024, 9 am – 6 pm

Opening: Friday 11 October, 3 pm

Our ideas of energy are shaped by a loud, pounding machine age. In her precise and contemplative works, Judith Fegerl counters them with silent processes of exchange. Energy flows, heat is exchanged, in-between spaces become essential for a dialogue of the elements. When the arrangement, the architecture, is right, exchange happens effortlessly – without friction losses, without noise. An almost utopian topos – and yet physical reality in “still matrix”, the installation newly created for the garden pavilion of Melk Abbey. Here the artist continues her sculpture series “still” and expands it with new objects created especially for this space – for the first time introducing anodised colours into her previously purely metallic world. She develops functioning heat sinks – heat exchangers that are, however, passive elements: energy flows and invisibly changes its form. So too in the sculpture “habaï ne sï natena, se paï tanïmena – Let us give back to nature what it has given us”, in which elements of solar power generation stretch towards the light in an ornamental, almost organic way and enter into dialogue with the rampant jungle landscape of Wenzel Bergl's frescoes. Fegerl creates structures that give space to invisible processes and invite quiet observation and reflection.

Judith Fegerl, born in Vienna in 1977 and raised in Kaltenleutgeben, is one of the most acclaimed artists of her generation. Her work centres on the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes conflict-laden connection between human and machine, body and technology, space and time. Her exhibitions have taken her from Vienna across Europe, to the USA and to China. In the works conceived for the baroque abbey pavilion, the paradisiacal promises of the past are met by a curious inquiry into mysterious physics. Forces that already shape our everyday lives unquestioned hold the promise of a new era.

© Fritz Enzo Kargl

Media coverage highlights:

Michael Huber reported on the exhibition in Kurier, Michaela Fleck in NÖN.

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