Judith Fegerl: Silent Machines

Exhibition in the pavilion of Melk Abbey Park

12 October – 3 November 2024, daily from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm

Vernissage: Friday 11 October 2024, 3:00 pm

In her precise and contemplative works, Judith Fegerl counters our ideas of energy, which are characterized by a loud and pounding machine age, with silent processes of exchange. Energy flows, warmth is exchanged, spaces in between become essential for a dialogue between the elements. If the arrangement, the architecture is right, then the exchange succeeds without effort, without frictional losses, without noise. An almost utopian topos – and yet a physical reality in the new installation ‘still matrix’ created for the garden pavilion of Melk Abbey. Here, the artist continues her ‘still’ series of sculptures and expands it with new objects created especially for this space – for the first time, she works with anodised colours in the previously purely metallic world. She develops functioning heat sinks, i.e., heat exchangers, which are, however, passive elements – energy flows, invisibly transforming their form. This is also the case in the sculpture ‘habaï ne sï natena, se paï tanïmena – Let’s give back to nature what it has given us’, in which elements of solar power production stretch out towards the light in an ornamental, almost organic way and enter into a dialogue with the sprawling jungle landscape of Wenzel Bergl’s frescoes. Fegerl creates structures that give space to invisible processes and invite quiet observation and reflection.