SUSE STOISSER: Now You See It

4 – 30 April 2016

The Austrian artist Suse Stoisser, born in Leibnitz in Southern Styria in 1964, shows a high level of creativity in her artistic oeuvre and is focused in recovering inspiration by turning energy and illusion into a feasible utopia. She shows us that it is possible to search for what Rilke called ”das Schwere”, referring to the difficult and the heavy, that what remains and what resists. In her investigations of materials, she switches from inclusion to collages of individual elements, the application of suggestive colors to metallic monochromacy, at the same time creating an ethereal character out of polycarbonate substance. Despite the strong physical presence of Stoisser’s artwork, we are struck by the elusive character captured in these objects. The figure appears as a reduction of human forms, in the shape of silhouettes, connoting eroticism and the metamorphic potency of nature. In combination with the quintessence of creative vitality Stoisser’s London Exhibition Now You See It.  at Art Bermondsey Project Space provides a survey of the creative evolution of the artist.

The artist’s oeuvre features classical as well as contemporary references. In Vermeer’s paintings lies a dichotomy between what is and what is not visible; in Antonioni’s movie Blow-up the dichotomy is between what is seen and what is not seen; in Alain Resnais’  Hiroshima mon amour what is said and what is not said. These contrasts are continually present in Stoisser’s oeuvre.

Another fundamental dimension shared by Rainer Maria Rilke and Joseph Beuys, which represents a revolutionary extension in the comprehension of sculpture, is the innovative idea of expressing art in motion and to incorporate the notion of time. Stoisser takes up the findings of Beuys to show us a work divided into layers, where contrasts coexist, where one thing reinforces the other and finally, where the process is alive. Open figures, cut figures, obverses and reverses, sculptural subject and sculptural object. Suse Stoisser presents the dialectic nature of a piece via the contradictory complexity of the material itself, and encourages us to think about the importance of the work in progress and process.