Exhibition Tour | INGE DICK | Lichtzeiten

[00:00:00]Hello everybody. Welcome to our new show with the Austrian artist Ingadik. She has started out as a conceptual painter of white paintings only. Later on in our tour, we will see these works and other paintings as well. Today, Ingadik's perception is focused on a photographic work which she began in the late '7s.

[00:00:22]And yes, we are not showing a youngster in our exhibition, but a conceptual female artist of 85 years. Let's start with our entrance space, kind of the core of our show.

[00:00:36]Light changes continuously, almost imperceptibly, yet it determines everything we see. For more than six decades, Ingredic has devoted herself to the quiet observation of light and time.

[00:00:51]Her works do not depict motives in a traditional sense. They make perception itself visible. What began as a pragmatic tool became a decisive expansion of her artistic language.

[00:01:08]Working with Polaroid cameras from the early 1980s until the end of the technology in the mid 2000s, Polaroid works play a central role in Ingadik's exploration of light and time. She started out with SX70 format, the small size everybody knows, and then kept getting bigger using a constant medium format aperture and exposure time. In this seven-part work, Dick photographed a monochrome white surface over the course of a day.

[00:01:44]A new image was taken whenever the light meter registered a slight change in daylight intensity, brighter or darker, without altering the camera settings. In this way, the rhythm of the work is determined not by the clock, but by the light itself.

[00:02:04]The Polaroid material plays a crucial role in this process. Its chemical properties intensify the blue tones of daylight, giving the images a soft painterly quality. Each Polaroid is a unique object and a precise record of a specific moment, always marked by the artist with handwritten notes of date and time. Together they do not depict a single image but trace the passing of time as a gradual shift of light and color.

[00:02:41]On the opposite wall, we are very happy to be able to show Boston Black dated March 17, 1999.

[00:02:50]With the help of a generous German collector couple, Ingadik traveled specifically to Boston where the world's only large format Polaroid camera was installed at the headquarter of the Polaroid company. Everything you would have wanted to shoot with this camera, you would have to transport to Boston and place it in front of this gigantic camera. The camera produced photographs measuring 244x 113 cm, an exceptional format that could not be realized anywhere else.

[00:03:29]Shortly after this production, the original Polaroid Corporation ceased production of instant film as the company went bankrupt and its iconic analog materials disappeared from the market, making works like Boston Black deeply tied to a moment that can no longer be replicated.

[00:03:53]With the end of Polaroid technology, a new chapter begins. In digital film and photographic works, color itself becomes an event. Time condenses into strips, sequences, visual rhythms.

[00:04:09]Here we encounter another seven-part work, this time structured vertically.

[00:04:16]This work belongs to the ongoing series Bluriel which Ingadik has been developing since 1998.

[00:04:24]The series is often realized in multi-art constellations and is based on photographic images of the sky. The sky is not understood as a motif but as an exhaustable field of color.

[00:04:39]The artist digitally processes the original sky photographs, dissolving the depicted motive into subtle graduations of blue and near monochrome fields. In this work, the image grain comes to the four, transforming the sky from a representational subject into a material and perceptual phenomenon.

[00:05:05]Springlight White is a seminal film and photography project. The work forms part of her ongoing series Yarus Lewis translating into years light white in which she investigates the subtle barely perceptible shifts of natural light across the seasons. For this project, Dick transformed her studio into a completely white space, including the floors, and recorded continuously with a fixed digital camera for two days and nights throughout the spring.

[00:05:42]While the human eye perceives white surfaces as stable, the camera bypasses this cognitive adjustment and captures fleeting color changes in daylight caused by weather, cloud cover, and time of day.

[00:05:59]The resulting digital films are then often broken down into film stilts set in parallel strips revealing a rhythmic and poetic spectrum of springtime colors in yellow, orange, white, and black.

[00:06:17]It's not a secret that I'm a big fan of the color blue. Blue infinite title of this piece documents the changing sky over the course of a single day. Unlike Ingadic's earlier stripe works which were photographed from the ground like the piece we have seen before, this series was created at Europe's highest materological observatory.

[00:06:40]It is situated at 3,16 m above sea level. The photographs were taken on June 28th, 2010 between 6:52 a.m. and 700 p.m. The Burke captures the continuous transformation of the sky and its countless shades of blue.

[00:07:12]The series Lameir brings together works in which Inadeic repeatedly directs her digital camera towards water.

[00:07:20]Dick's sustained engagement with the element of the sea is deeply rooted in her life by the Monte and her annual stays on a Greek island in the Mediterranean Sea.

[00:07:33]She's drawn to the everchanging structures of the water's surface and to the shifting qualities of light and color that adhere to it. To capture these phenomena, she photographs predominantly during the early morning or evening hours. The structure of the water surface changes due to falling winds from the cliffing is looking down onto the sea.

[00:08:00]Opposite Laame Mer you find summer light white a 20part piece. Here Ingadik isolated selected colors from a summer's sunset and had them reproduced in 60 by 60 cm panels. Unlike her stripe works which emphasize gradual transitions over time, each panel represents a single color as an independent visual experience.

[00:08:30]Finally, we reach our backspace showroom with the paintings I've announced in my introduction at the beginning of our tour. The so-called white paintings have accompanied Inadik's works since the 70s. From early on, her work moved towards reduction and concentration, influenced by the stillness of then philosophy and deeply affected by the work of the Italian painter Antonio Calder.

[00:08:58]If we take a closer look, you realize she applies oil paint with a pallet knife, not a brush, creating this beautiful pattern. Even though the paintings seem purely white, they are not. Subtle color grounds are always present. These works demand time. Time to look, time to perceive the smallest shifts.

[00:09:24]In more recent years, a new material enters Inade's work, Gold Leaf. Like the white paintings, these works follow a clear and restrained order. But while white absorbs light, gold responds with reflection. The surface no longer holds light quietly within itself. It sends it back intensified and radiant. In this way, a circle closes from a silent approach to light to its luminous condensation, from contemplation to presence. In some of these works, the surface is deliberately ruptured. Within these openings, color becomes visible.

[00:10:06]Reds, yellows, and oranges emerging from beneath the gold. Especially Ingredict's white and golden works are almost impossible to capture through photography or film. Their subtle nuances and changing appearances can only truly be experienced in person. We therefore warmly invite you to visit us and explore Ingred's exhibition liiton which is on view until August 29.

[00:10:37]Please note that during August, our opening hours change slightly. We are open Wednesday to Saturday from 2 to 6:00 p.m. You can always reach us by email if you have any questions. We wish you a wonderful summer and enjoy all the colors of the season. Bye-bye.