PRESS REACTIONS
about „Ganze Tage dazwischen“
Sculpture Magazine | International Sculpture Center New York
(…) Unlike Morris and Turrell, Wachmann does not focus on the purity of the experience. Instead, she creates an allusive object that highlights the installation`s continual indeterminacy. Its vagueness leaves room fo the viewer to interpret the environment according to his or her own experience. Such an illusion also requires us to adapt to new visual terms. Though we are culturally conditioned to accept the conventions of two-dimensional pictorial illusion, we rarely encounter such an llusion in an actual physical space. The initial effect upon entering Wachmann`s new realm, caused by the apparent lack of control over our visual faculties, is mood altering and even visceral.
Once acclimated, though, the space can be calming, transcendent and – as the press release states – even sublime. (…) (read all)
neue bildende kunst (nbk), Zeitschrift für Kunst und Kritik
(…) “Wiebke Maria Wachmann combines concept and sensuality in „Ganze Tage dazwischen“: A suspended white bed in a startlingly white room, submerged in a brilliant light. The visual state, evoked by the glaring light and the shadowless aesthetic, absorbs both senses and reality and culminates in a unique, silent world. In contrast to the cool minimalism of Wachmann, but just as intensive, is the work of Chiaru Shiota.“ (…)
Der Tagesspiegel
(…) „…the 29-year old concept artist has seized one of the rooms, installed a kind of bed‚ and submerged it in white paint. Sounds banal, but it isn’t. Not a shadow is to be made out, everything glows brightly and uniformly, seems to swim before the eyes of the viewer. A fascinating arrangement, almost like a picture from a dream. „Ganze Tage dazwischen“ is the name of Wachmann’s work.“ (…)
taz
(…)“Wiebke Maria Wachmann has submerged a room in white, dazzling, blinding, supernaturally bright white. A white bed is suspended in the middle, the right place for a “ near death experience“ or a few hours of torture. Strangely the „visual silence“ in the room, the white colour, appears to absorb every sound: an interesting synaesthetic experience.“ (…)
Kieler Nachrichten | “Still Searching For A Position” by Peter Holm
(…) The works on show are hardly world-beating; the artists around 30 years old apparently have yet to find their way, are still searching – except for Wiebke Maria Wachmann: in her floating bed installation, her radical use of the colour white and ingenious artificial lighting cancel out spatial perspective, transposing it onto two dimensions, creating a strangely remote atmosphere somewhere between hospital sterility and heavenly weightlessness. Perfect workmanship and no compromises are the order of the day here. The installation is integrated seamlessly into the exhibition space; even the skirting boards of the Overbeck Pavilion had to be moved in order to heighten the tension between voyeuristic curiosity and personal concern.
“Young Berlin Artists At Overbeck”
“Whole Days Between” is the title of an installation by Wiebke Maria Wachmann. She has divided off one area of the pavilion and created a separate space. Through a small window, one looks into a white-painted room, in the middle of which a bed appears to float. But not only the bed is floating: the hazy lighting makes the entire space appear to be in motion. An inspiring optical experiment.
about „Fall“
Die Welt
“…It (art) leaves one cold only if it fails to fill the empty spaces with life, fails to transform experience or observation into something new. With this in mind, Barbara Caveng, Reinhard Kühl, Wiebke Maria Wachmann and Iepe Rubingh at the „Postfuhramt“, leave nobody cold. Their powerful works ensure that the exhibition keeps the promise made by its title “und ab die Post…”
“…Wiebke Maria Wachmann also observes the existential within the trivial. She has designed a startling room with two mirrors. The only contents are a toppled table and a shelf. Her blindingly white artworld seems emotionally-charged through the multiple reflections of these objects. The viewer has the feeling that he is falling into infinity. He tries in vain to find a fixed focal point and stumbles into the void. And so it goes on endlessly, in free fall, downwards orupwards, depending on your perspective…”
Der Tagesspiegel
“…He (T. Liljeberg) thought he saw the future in Wiebke Maria Wachmann’s installation. The artist, one of a younger generation promoted by the College of the Arts (HdK), has transformed a small room with two mirrors and brilliant white walls into a metaphor for pure infinity. Thebrightly-lit, endless shaft, demanded that Liljeberg“look heavenward, where the festivities had begun.“ Moreover, this ascension into the Olympian culture reminds one of the white rabbit in „Alice in Wonderland, which purposefully looks in only one direction.“ And just as with Alice’s freefall down, down, down into the rabbit warren, so it is with Wachmann. The poetic intensity of her work remains inexhausted as long as the prospect of the fall remains unrealised…”
ars (Italy)
“…Wiebke Maria Wachmann, on the other hand, continues to explore space and, in “Fall” creates an abyss in a square metre. One of the most fascinating things about this work is the extreme simplicity of the technical solution: familiar, childlike, old…”
Die Welt
“…whoever follows the blood-red poster with the five Olympic rings up to the first floor will soon feel dazzled. Literally, – due to Wiebke Maria Wachmanns installation „Fall”. „Fall” is an artificially erected room, the floor and ceiling of which have been mounted with mirrors. Thisproduces the effect that the minimalistic contents of the room, a white table and a shelf, appear to sink into limitless depths. And that the small room glows brightly…”
Fake, Nr.12
“…I was most impressed, in a purely artistic sense and in terms of perspective and perception, by the installation “Fall” by Wiebke Maria Wachmann. A small white room, ceiling and floor are covered with mirrors; glaring, monochrome light, the only piece of furniture a toppled rack of shelves on the wall opposite the viewer and a bisected table. Only due to the reflection do these items of furniture become whole. When you look up it is hard to believe how far the(apparent) stairs wind heavenwards. When you look down you search, in vain, for a focal point in the limitless space, which results from the ingenious structure of the shelving, lending the room a sense of depth. Magnificent…”
artery
“…Wiebke Maria Wachmann’s installation “Fall”, in comparison, worked precisely because ofthe reduction to basic form. An endless descent (or ascent) is suggested by covering the ceiling and floor of a room with mirrors and illuminating the whole with a dazzling light…”
Berliner Morgenpost
“…one of the successes is…Wiebke Maria Wachmann’s existential hall of mirrors…”
Neues Deutschland
“Artistic Ideas Flourish In The Cellar”: (…) Into the infinite is where we Wiebke Maria Wachmann’s white shaft takes us: the ceiling and floor of a small room are mirrored, elongating the space upwards and downwards, never ending. One is confronted with a rift in the world, but one whose isolation also makes it a peaceful, inviting space. Going down the rusty iron staircase to the cellar, one is reminded of a companion piece to Wachmann’s work: at the foot of the staircase, there is a large puddle that reflects the steps in its surface, abruptly removing the ground under one’s feet.
about „Reconstruction of a birch-forest“
Saarbrücker Zeitung
“… Wiebke Maria Wachmann’s white-hued birch forest, about which a visitor commented that it was a dazzling spectacle, contains other dimensions. He finds himself in a different exhibition site, which, because of its history and its morbid condition, could itself be described as an object in motion…”
Süddeutsche Zeitung
“… such contributions counter the frequently expressed criticism aimed at the Z-generation that they are too hedonistic, consumer-oriented or full of themselves. The opposite is the case, as proven by the exhibition “present representation”. Here we become acquainted with Wiebke Maria Wachmann in her birch forest installation…”
Die Welt | Kerstin Rottmann und Josef Englers
“…maybe the ominous young art is presented at its most persuasive when it can be tried out at some distance from its parental home – the “Z2000” exhibition… Twelve artists grappleintensively with the new media and the ironically refracted longing for originality. Wiebke Maria Wachmann has constructed the “Reproduction of a birch forest” in a separate room and portrays nature in a clinical manner: numerous birch trees, painted white, amid white walls and a glittering light are to be seen here…”
Kondensat | Nr.12
(…) Wachmann casts a spell with her “Reconstruction of a Birch Forest”, a brightly lit installation that appears to inhabit another dimension.
about: „…and when the wind walked into the room, time stood still.“
“In The Chaos Of Silence”
A white room, only visible through a single window. A blind flutters as if battered by a gale, a window casement has been torn partly off its hinges. There is not a breath of wind in the gallery but a storm seems to be raging. In the room behind: biting white within which outlines only gradually emerge. The image Wiebke Maria Wachmann creates with the effect of the window and the frozen movement is like a three-dimensional film still. In this way, she preserves a moment before the actual situation collapses and becomes lost in the glaring light.
Berliner Zeitung | Ingeborg Ruthe, Sebastian Preuss | “Orienting Young Art”
(…) The fluid transitions between real space and the illusion of space form the chosen focus of Wiebke Maria Wachmann and David Adam. Through a large window, the viewer looks into a room with white walls, the light from a bulb glaringly covers the apparently frozen scene installed by the Berlin artist Wiebke Wachmann. This suggests not only the reversal of inside and outside, but also a familiar situation: like after a long night, when the curtains are drawn back and the sun shines in one’s face, painful, surprising, but finally reassuring – a new day begins.
Zitty | Ulrich Clewing
(…) The fluid transition between space and illusory space is the shared theme of artists Wiebke Maria Wachmann and David Adam. Wachmann’s installations show a totally whitened room in which the light shines so brightly that the outlines of objects blur and pieces of furniture appear to float.
about „From sublime spaces: The apartment“
taz | “Sublime Beauty”
A room is reduced to the mare minimum, every trace of colour eliminated. Everything is white: walls, ceiling, floor and furniture. This space, details of which are visible in large-format photographs, is located in Wiebke Maria Wachmann’s apartment. In her photographs the shadows mark the everyday, with objects identifiable only by their darker outlines. The more sublime their impression, the more ghostly these excerpts from day-to-day life appear. At the same time, the white outshines the banality and bathes it in a futuristic atmosphere.
Waz | “To Hospital, Lights Flashing” by Kathrin Lange
(…) Wiebke Maria Wachmann’s photographs, on the other hand, are much lighter. They show a totally white room in her Berlin apartment lit with strong movie lamps: the blinding light wipes out the outlines of the space, materiality is dissolved by brightness.
about „The clearing“
Etoile | Fraktale IV – death, von Lolita Rossignol
(…) Of particular interest [is] the installation by Wiebke Maria Wachmann which dazzles the viewer with a white forest clearing that blazes in a glaring bright light, like a window into a realm between hope, consolation and sublime beauty.
Salzburger Nachrichten | “Death in The Condemned Palace”
(…) And in one case death comes dressed in radiant white: Wiebke Maria Wachmann presents us with a forest clearing burned to ashes (or frozen solid by permafrost?) – a frightening but fascinating anti-habitat.