CURA.

Raphaela Vogel artistic language interlaces monumental sculptures with paintings on leather or fabric and video sculptures, from which emanate hypnotic, at times screeching sounds, creating unsettling constellations. Gender, violence, death, and humor are explored throughout Vogel’s work and form the basis of her inquiry into the assumed binary relationships between humanity and nature, technology and biology, fantasy and reality.

My Appropriation of Her Holy Hollowness, presented at Confort Moderne, comprises recent and new works across three gallery spaces. A new series of seven large-scale sound sculptures, which gives the exhibition its name, dominates the central space. Casts of lions made of polyurethane are mounted on metallic poles, fixed and suspended in rows from the ceiling. Round-shaped speakers adorn the tips of the sculptures’ tails and hover tentatively above the floor. They emit the soft tune of a German song, the first from Austrian romantic composer Franz Schubert’s series Winter Journey titled ‘Good Night’ (1828) that deals with the pain of lost love. Played and sung by Vogel herself, the song’s lyrics, originally written by German poet Wilhelm Müller, are replaced by extracts taken from angrily written letters exchanged by the artist with a former lover whereby both quarrel over the claim and access to cultural spaces following their separation.

The installation becomes an intimate biographical portrait, a melancholic elegiac musical score presented in form through the rigid regularity of both of the sculptures that follow the rhythm of the sound and of the speakers that act as notes. The traditional symbolism of power and masculinity associated with the lion is abstracted through the porous drip of the casting process and further undermined by the sound of the artist’s voice which permeates the space. Hybrid, skeletal forms emerge and serve as a macabre reminder of the violent mechanization of the farming industry. It also offers a reflection on the disintegration of today’s socio-political system, which Schubert addresses metaphorically in his Winter Journey series within the context of 19th century Germany.