Portrait of Barbara Breitenfellner, © Photo: Les Jones
Barbara Breitenfellner, WVZ 001–509, catalogue raisonné, artist’s book, three signed and numbered editions, 2018.
→Barbara Breitenfellner. Fake Territories. Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2016.
→Barbara Breitenfellner, Coded Sleep, Berlin: Bongoût Editions, 2011.
Barbara Breitenfellner, Dream: The works still have to be defined in their materiality (collage? photography? painting?). Everything is tripled. Not yet quite clear how the works are to be transferred from the virtual to the real, especially with regard to glitch and authorship. – Then a film. A snowy landscape. We walk through the snow (-storm). A girl lies down with her braid going into her back (it is digitally transformed). Then the back falls apart digitally. A liquid (blood) runs from a table and somebody else drinks it. It transforms through the body into a (liquid) drug, Centre photographique d’Île-de-France, Pontault-Combault, 2 May-13 July 2019.
→Barbara Breitenfellner, TRAUMA, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, 29 September-18 December 2011.
→Opinions informes, Bétonsalon, Paris, February 1-12, 2006.
Austrian visual artist.
An Austrian artist based in Berlin, Barbara Breitenfellner works in installation, collage, silkscreen and photogravure. Initially trained in sculpture, she pursued her studies at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1998 with a Master of Fine Ars. Against the backdrop of this post-industrial city, she developed her practice as part of the burgeoning British art scene, notably working alongside Douglas Gordon (b. 1966), Christine Borland (b. 1965), Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966), Rosalind Nashashibi (b. 1973) and Simon Starling (b. 1967). Following her graduation, B. Breitenfellner undertook artist residencies in Copenhagen (Kulturfabrikken/Pépinières européennes, 1999) and Omaha in the United States (Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, 2002), before moving to Berlin.
It was while studying in Glasgow at the end of the 1990s that the artist committed to a modus operandi that she continues to observe meticulously to this day: the translation of her dreams into reality. Using memories noted down upon waking as a starting point, she creates physical spaces filled with varied cultural references, then brings them to life through architectures, objects and performances. The dreams she examines always seem to deal, directly or indirectly, with fantasies she might create, pieces or exhibitions. In rendering them visible, she constructs a sort of metasystem of the art world, which is later condensed or deformed by her actions upon it in the real world. Her method, painstakingly followed, leads to diverse results, which can be further developed for exhibitions and publications. From 2006, as B. Breitenfellner began to explore new techniques of printing on paper, such as screen printing, collages produced using photomechanical processes began to appear in her dreamlike installations.
Alongside her written dream-library compiled year on year, which to date contains over one hundred and seventy accounts, B. Breitenfellner also collects all kinds of popular illustrated publications, with subjects as varied as animals, astronomy, mathematics and the circus. From these iconographies she selects and carefully harvests, with cutter or scalpel, elements from their pages. Then, with an approach that recalls Aby Warburg’s methods of comparative analysis, she explores the associations between images belonging to different worlds and registers. At first, associations are temporary: having chosen a background that acts as a matrix for the work to come, B. Breitenfellner uses paper clips to marry, fleetingly, elements of her composition. The elements are moved around, still adrift, until the sensation of stratified spaces reaches its intended climax and a final arrangement emerges, at once formally seductive and somehow disturbing. The frames of the compositions, be they old and mismatched or modern and standardised, add another layer of materiality to the dream. The artist has produced over seven hundred such collages over twenty years (series WVZ); in 2018 she published the first 509 in a limited edition catalogue raisonné. The works, when transposed to a monumental scale, may even be displayed as installations throughout an exhibition space (Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, 2019).
Since the late 1990s B. Breitenfellner has exhibited in the United Kingdom, Germany and France. She has participated in a number of residencies in France, notably at the Cité internationale des arts (2011, 2018). In 2020 she was awarded Marianne-Werefkin-Prize and in 2023 she was nominated for the AWARE – Nouveaux Regards prize.
