Michaela Schwarz Weismann – Second Thoughts, Galerie Ruberl, Vienna

Michaela Schwarz Weismann – Second Thoughts

May 14 – July 18, 2019

Galerie Ruberl, Vienna

1973: Three filmed interviews, three great thinkers:
Hannah Arendt / Simone de Beauvoir / Angela Davis

2019: Three portrait series, 24 frames

Each interview second is split into 24 frames and painted. The results are 24 portraits, minimally altered, without repetitions. Each picture influences the next. Finally, all 24 oil paintings are reassembled into a film, gaining speed, rushing in an endless loop. A new rhythm arises.

Michaela Schwarz-Weismann:

“These seconds are words, one breath long or shorter, that I have carefully chosen from the interviews. They are vague words, hints, intermediate pieces: Beauvoir says‘très souple,’ Davis – ‘constantly,’ and Arendt – ‘of course not’ Nothing precise is revealed; it’s an invitation rather than an explanation. An invitation to deal again with the themes and contents of these thinkers. Human beings trapped in an endless loop between the past and the future. 1973 is also the year of my birth. SECOND THOUGHTS is a work about becoming, as a symbol of life and time in its essential movement. It’s a narrative measuring of time, a fortification and investigation of this brief moment between the past and the future, while addressing the issue of constructing the present.”

Thoughts and emotions are reflected in faces. Michaela Schwarz-Weismann’s intense portrait series intensify this by offering additional levels of interpretation and identification through deliberately chosen language fragments. Thus her narrative is also about thinking about thinking and about measuring time, inviting us – as she puts it – “to investigate this brief moment between the past and the future” which is necessary in order to understand and retell the present. (A. Grubeck)

All images > courtesy © Galerie Ruberl, Vienna