Die Haut der Dinge
GALERIE3, Klagenfurt · 27 September – 8 November 2025. Opening: Friday, 26 September 2025, 7 pm. In the Cabinet: Peter Krawagna | Suse Krawagna | Michael Kravagna.
About five years ago, Iris Kohlweiss — who studied painting under Christian Ludwig Attersee — made a quantum leap in her artistic practice. She turned not only to drawing as a medium, but also began to engage, both theoretically and artistically, with perceptions and sensations of space. In these few years she has developed an original visual language that has produced a spatial metaphorics as complex as it is poetic. Art-historically speaking, one might locate her approach as a synthesis of Maria Lassnig's body-awareness paintings and Hilma af Klint's visualizations of a spiritual dimension. The "Realm Translations" — as Kohlweiss calls the series of "spatial transpositions" she began at the time — are not only the provisional culmination of her artistic practice so far, but also pay tribute to her lifelong fascination with spaces and their specific atmospheres. Yet at first glance, nothing in the drawings seems to refer to particular spaces. The structure of the composition bears no relation to any given floor plan, nor do the forms mirror characteristic elements of the respective space. The artist's finely nuanced language of color and form thus reaches beyond what we would consider immediate reality.
Since the "spatial turn" or "topological turn," space has no longer been understood as a Cartesian box, but as a socio-cultural quantity — a field of possibility shaped by our perceptions and actions. A space is, of course, physically present, but what we take to be real depends strongly on our personal interpretation, on our knowledge, our experiences, and, naturally, the cultural conditioning of our perception. Kohlweiss therefore understands space not as something given, but as a relational field — that is, for her, space is not merely perceived with body and mind and experienced through the flesh, but is essentially constituted through our perception in the first place. These perceptions of space, which are at the same time constructions of space, are the starting point for her symbolic representations of space, which she herself has recently termed "fields of perception." The artist layers numerous, delicately applied strata of colored pencil that, as bodily feeling, mental image, and physical perception, bring forth an abstract, metaphorical form. Kohlweiss not only condenses different levels of perception into a single image, but makes the very process of perception her subject.
At GALERIE3, the artist now presents her most recent work under the title "The Skin of Things." Alongside current drawings from the wide field of her "Realm Translations," the "Excerpta" series also announces her return to painting. On canvases, some of them large-format, formations appear that seem like excerpts from her complex draughtsmanly cosmos. What were once open fields of perception have become semantic forms, transforming the vagrant, fluid quality of the drawings into clear contours and unified planes. In the title, Kohlweiss speaks of "the skin of things," referring on the one hand to the clear, simple forms of her new works, which correspond to the representational. On the other hand, she emphasizes skin as the plane of contact between space and body — for it is through skin that we touch and are touched, and that we perceive space consciously and unconsciously. With the image of skin as a membrane that both delimits and mediates, the artist once again underscores the threshold between inside and outside, the visible and the invisible, the real and the imaginary that runs through her work.
The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in his "Poetics of Space," established the image of the self as a space of permeable walls. Since Hans Belting and his "anthropology of images," we know that the body is the true site of images. The works of Iris Kohlweiss give outstanding symbolic form to the permeability of spatial boundaries, the mutual interpenetration of bodily space and surrounding space, the floating of images, and the fusion of the real with the imaginary in a sphere of the poetic.
Text: Roman Grabner, 2025