Victoria Reichelt

Victoria Reichelt studied Fine Art at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, graduating in 2005 having completed her Doctor of Visual Arts with a semester research exchange at the Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland. She has been shortlisted for a number of major prizes including the Sulman Art Prize (at the Art Gallery of New South Wales), the Fletcher Jones Art Prize, the RBS Emerging Artist Award and the Metro Art Award. Recently she has been awarded an Australia Council New Work Grant, the Linden Innovators Award and the people's choice prizes in both the RBS Emerging Artist Award and the Metro Art Award. Her work has been included in the exhibitions Covered at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, the Red Exhbition at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and Contemporary Australia: Optimism at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Brisbane.

Exhibitions

Spectrum - 2009

Previously in my practice, I have made 'portraits' of Australian artists by painting photographs of their bookshelves, in which the book spines and what these objects represented was paramount. In this new body of work I am furthering my investigations into books as objects, by examining how they function differently when used in a very different context. For the exhibition Spectrum, I am making a series of bookshelf paintings that sit together in a line to form a colour spectrum installation. The shapes of the shelves are modeled on Piet Mondrain's paintings from the 1920s/30s (a series of works comprising black lines with occasional blocks of colour, forming simple grid shapes). These bookshelves are each filled with similarly coloured books, photographed and then painted. The paintings will have the appearance of a Minimalist installation from a distance, yet function as more literal 'realist paintings' when viewed close up, playing with the detailed nature of the objects as they contrast with the sparse vocabulary of Minimalism. The books are disparate groups connected only by their spine colours - using them in this way echoes Minimalist concerns of form over content, whereby the books are stripped of their literary significance and reduced simply to colours. In these works, the books highlight the repetition of geometric forms through a colour spectrum, thus the titles and what they represent are no longer the focus, rather they act as structural tools in a bigger picture. Victoria Reichelt

Melbourne Art Fair - 2008

I am currently making a series of paintings based on bookshelves. Some paintings are portraits of Australian artists and some are random shelves and collections of books, often particularly worn, their tattered jackets reflect their long years and multiple readings. These works are a paradox to paint, as once the books are an image on canvas they are shut forever and can never be read. In a painting they serve a very different purpose from their intended function - they are purely objects like any others, that have histories and narratives of their own, quite separate from the text inside them. Yet we are still drawn to that text and narrative as represented by the painting and underscored by the book jacket illustrations, titles and authors' names. With the invention of printing techniques that enabled the mass reproduction of books in the 19th century, came a desire for people to collect and display books. Decisions people make about the books they chose to buy, keep and display reveal a considerable amount about them. Conventional portraiture relies on a visual representation of the subject, through which most of the information you get is about their visual appearance. However, photographing and painting someone's bookshelf reveals another side to them and offers a deeper insight into their interests. When discussing bookshelves in modern day houses, Alan Powers suggests that 'they represent the extension of a personal world, whether their purpose is the active research of the scholar, the pride possession of the collector or the random acquisitiveness of the curious mind'. (Powers, A. 1999, Living With Books, Octopus Publishing Group, London). Victoria Reichelt

Victoria Reichelt - Melbourne Art Fair Installation

Victoria Reichelt - Melbourne Art Fair Stand

Victoria Reichelt - Melbourne Art Fair Installation Shot

Focus - 2007

Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain perception. Leibniz Victoria Reichelt paints collections of objects which have outlived their use. Her paintings have a second hand or 'second degree' (Barthes) aesthetic. She explores the op shop to investigate reality as a fiction and text. Her paintings foreground the division between what represents and what is represented. She paints outmoded toys, games and books while calling into question image and object. The lack of emotion in Reichelt's paintings suggests the estrangement and the distortion that accompanies the classification of things. In this sense, she produces a doubled or fissured image of an aberration. Her paintings exist in a liminal threshold between the past and a new era. This threshold was explored in the films of the director, Jean Luc Goddard when the art of critique reached an impasse in the emergence of popular mass culture. Reichelt's paintings of lifeless, antique cameras foreground the beauty of redundant objects and the fad to collect them. The careful realism of Reichelt's paintings suggests the surreal influence of the uncanny in her work. Photographic realism was a strategy employed by Dali and Magritte to unsettle rather than reassure. Reichelt selects objects to investigate the nature of reality and representation. Her recent paintings of cameras question the relationship between image, object and gaze. Surrealist writers and artists were drawn to the potential of photography to question the truth of appearance and reality. Man Ray and Hans Bellmer staged the effect of dream and nightmare because the photographic mis en scene enabled them to produce and contemplate images of their deepest fears. Photography also afforded a safe voyeurism; a domesticated version of absolute terror which could be manipulated and controlled artistically. Through a series of games and reversals Reichelt activates the uncanny. Ambiguity and resemblance affect a kind of doubling of identity in relation to the image. The primary effects of the uncanny include the fissure between the real and the imagined; and confusion between animate and inanimate states. Reichelt's paintings concern realities that are not only the most obscure, but also the most familiar. From this we can see that her presentation of ordinary objects in the imaginary plane of the painting removes them from their ordinary contexts and renders them strange. This feeling is heightened as they are old or outmoded objects. Reichelt also makes visible an object which is usually an absent or invisible trace in representation. These inert objects then seem to come to life and to return the gaze of the viewer. The 'realism' of Reichelt's work, far from encouraging belief in reality, promotes the discovery of sublimity that underlies it. Her paintings are not part of this world and represent what seems ridiculous in it. In Reichelt's paintings immanence replaces transcendence. Charlotte Hallows

Victoria Reichelt - Les Armees de Trios 2

Victoria Reichelt - Photographie Noire et Blanche

Library - 2005

I make paintings that investigate the relationship between photography and painting, through the use of domestic and banal objects that have drama and narrative despite their prosaic nature. I source these banal, yet slightly obscure objects from thrift stores and markets, so that they come with their own sense of history and narrative. The current series of works serve as an investigation into the act of painting where the painter's relationship is to the photograph as well as with the object itself. In this way, the act of collecting and photographing the subjects in a controlled studio setting, holds as much importance as the subsequent putting of paint on canvas.

Victoria Reichelt - Library Installation

This site requires Flash 9. If you are seeing this, you'll need to update your player before entering.
Click here to update.