Press release by Craig Garrett
Within this visually silent enclosure, the absence of shadows makes interior dimensions difficult
to gauge. In the stark whiteness, just as in pitch blackness, space seems to stretch on forever (a void that verges
on the infinite) pure and empty except for, floating unaccountably in the center of the room, a single, perfect,
white bed. The familiar object, encountered in this in-between state, grows suddenly unsettling. It is too perfect,
not a real bed nor even a rendering of a bed but rather an immaculate abstraction – a bed in a world of pure
thought. The entire phantom space resembles a Platonic ideal, a bedroom (or an operating room, or perhaps a
torture chamber) stripped down to its essence. This room is one of Wachmann’s „Sublime Spaces“. The
objects in it – like the trees in her „Birch Forest“ – occupy the borderland between existence and thought.
Wachmann’s art dwells in contradictions: sculpture without mass, space without volume. Her spectral trees
and floating beds are a narcotic for the eyes, drowsy apparitions to destabilize the senses. By moving from the
subliminal to the sublime, Wachmann produces sensations too terrible to comprehend yet too seductive to resist.
Craig Garrett
