Aglaia Konrad “Autofictions in Stone” at Secession, Vienna

Stone is omnipresent in all our lives; not least saliently, in the form of the architectures in which we live and work. In films, photographs, and sculptures, Aglaia Konrad grapples with the utopias and contradictions implicit in those architectures. The artist grew up in the Alps, and stone as the primeval material of rock formations and mountain landscapes as well as architecture has been central to her work from the outset.

For her installation projects, Konrad always begins from the given features of the exhibition venue. Her show “Autofictions in Stone” is a characteristic example: rather than abiding by the customary succession of the gallery’s rooms, the artist inverts the passage through them, starting in the long narrow room in the rear, which is illuminated by daylight from a broad ribbon window beneath the ceiling. She has also restored the exhibition spaces to their “original” condition: window openings and doorways that were later walled up have been reopened—one might almost say, unearthed. The artist interweaves this intervention into familiar procedures and structures at the Secession that had become second nature with an autofictional narrative.

Among the objects on display in the first room are rock fragments: granite from Gastein, yellow limestone from Untersberg, red marble from Adnet, and black marble from Belgium—each a place that figures prominently in Konrad’s life. The material’s specific cultural and geographic loci abut her personal history.

The exhibition is informed by the artist’s experimentation with relations of scale, perceptions of spaces, and diverse media parameters. A photograph of a detail at the Wittgenstein House in Vienna, for instance, is enlarged until it verges on an abstraction. In fact, the work feels less like a static image than like an ephemeral presence. Photography, here, becomes an intervention in three dimensions that is experienced in relation to one’s own bodily presence.

The dovetailing of architecture, photography, and body in Konrad’s art also speaks from the work Frauenzimmer (2022/25). It consists of window panes, at the same time reflective and transparent, that are positioned in the gallery in a series resembling that of the lenses inside a camera. The panes come from the CBR Building, an office complex in Brussels; designed in the brutalist style by Constantin Brodzki and Marcel Lambrichs and realized in 1967–1970, it was Brussel’s first prefabricated structure. Far from hiding concrete as the construction material, the modules showcase it as a deliberate aesthetic choice.

The surrounding architecture and the beholders themselves appear reflected in the panes or are visible through them. This way the work is effectively a performance modulating the audience’s engagement with the art, acting as a generator of images. Our own situation in the room, the manifold relations that link us to the world, our being-amid-things, becomes palpable once more. Something similar happens in a mirrored wall bearing a photograph of an ancient stone seating accommodation at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Trier, Germany. This work illustrates the artist’s conceptual approach to processes of perception—stone is present not only in the image, but also as a physical material and reflection.

The photograph of the stone shaped into a seat by human hands communicates with a red sofa positioned in the next room. Originally titled Decision by the designers, it is a piece of corporate furniture from the 1980s, a nod back to the panes from the CBR Building in Brussels. Instead of offering people a seat the sofa is occupied by eleven so-called “Rückbaukristalle.” Konrad is particularly fascinated by the demolition of architecture, which, as she argues, always also holds a sculptural potential. The RÜCKBAUKRISTALLE (2015–) are chunks of material like concrete or brick—remnants or detritus from a demolition that the artist had cut and polished like precious stones. With their gleaming surfaces, the pieces take on not only newfound value, but also an air of personages in their own right or quaint ritual objects.

The exhibition concludes with the screening, in the final room, of two of Konrad’s films in projection boxes designed by Kris Kimpe. IL CRETTO (2018) explores Alberto Burri’s monumental site-specific greyish-white concrete work in Sicily; Concrete & Samples III, Carrara (2010), meanwhile, is dedicated to one of the celebrated marble quarries near the Italian town of Carrara. The artist captures the landscape’s sculptural quality, its temporary architecture, art-historical references and environmental impact in serene tracking shots. The focus is on experiencing the material. The conjunction of aesthetic appeal and tangible massiveness speaks to the vast memories stored up by these stones, which we humans dress for our purposes on a daily basis and which yet transcend our lives by millions of years.

Curated by
Jeanette Pacher

at Secession, Vienna
until May 18, 2025