Ever since Raphaela Vogel’s first institutional solo show in 2015 at Bonner Kunstverein – puckishly titled ‘Raphaela and the Large Kunstverein’ – when she was still only 27 years old, art writers have attempted to pin down her bizarre, idiosyncratic work. For instance, Claudia Aigner, for the Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung, wrote in 2022: ‘You don’t always know what you’re seeing, but looking away isn’t an option.’

Almost a decade on from her meteoric debut, Vogel’s work remains as perplexing as it is fascinating. Even a shallow dip into Vogel’s wildly varied oeuvre – room-size metal frames draped with painted animal skins; dizzying videos starring the artist (and sometimes her dog) shot with a 360-degree camera; monumental sculptures featuring huge portable toilets or giraffes tethered to spliced-open genitals – reveals that she can’t be slotted into the canon’s existing pigeonholes. ‘I’m interested in entertaining myself,’ she said during one of our encounters in Berlin this winter, without irony or arrogance. ‘Or creating a first draft of a world.’

Spending time with Vogel, or her work, feels like an invitation to enter a peculiar multidimensional cosmos which requires learning an entirely new visual vocabulary. Intuitive and non-hierarchical, its methods both DIY and digital, Vogel’s language contains few familiar phrases; it rather evokes primordial emotions and instant reactions. As Kunsthalle Basel director Elena Filipovic writes in the catalogue essay for the 2018 exhibition ‘Ultranackt’, Vogel’s shows or installations usually feature at least one ‘fist in the face’ – an oversize medical model of a boob squirting milk does pack a punch. But there’s also a quieter world-weariness and generous  doses of humour and playfulness. Just as Vogel entertains herself, she also entertains us.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.