Brigitte Waldach virtuously explores the possibilities of contemporary drawing practice in her diverse artistic work.
Image gallery
For her large-scale drawing complexes, which she also develops in relation to literary texts or musical phenomena, she uses graphite, pigment pencil, gouache, handwritten lines of text, threads of rubber to draw - on the page, on the wall, in space. She identifies drawing as a medium for discursive reflection and for the development of mental spaces.
In her works, she not only refers to historical or current political phenomena, but also gives them a space in the connection between sign and text, between line and sound, in which individual cognition and sensual experience are condensed into powerful images and thus make complex connections tangible.
At the center of her exhibition "History now" at the kommunale Galerie Pankow is the eponymous series of eight large-format drawings dedicated to the depiction of digital mediation and use of knowledge, using Wikipedia as an example.
As one of the largest Internet portals worldwide, it shapes our awareness of history. The Internet platform makes knowledge accessible, offers us information in enormous abundance, which manifests itself in a highly dynamic process as modern encyclopedic historiography.
Brigitte Waldach asks with her "History Now" sequence: What is relevant as an entry at all, what is argued about most on Wikipedia? Which entries are most often overwritten? It is not surprising that especially topics like religion and anti-Semitism cause controversial discussions; for example, the articles on Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler are among the most frequently overwritten.
In her eight drawings, Brigitte Waldach picks out selected persons or figures, among them Buddha, Hannah Arendt, or the RAF members, and portrays them mimetically and by means of the changing text passages in different shades of gray, reflecting the text changes on Wikipedia and insofar also the time period of the image's creation. The condensed levels of writing enter into dialogue with the graphic representation and structure the pictorial space as an equal motif to figuration. In this way, images emerge about the complexity of our appropriation of the world, reconciling the analog with the digital, the ephemeral with the permanent, dissolution and solidification.
Waldach's work has been shown in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally. This solo exhibition during Gallery Weekend in Berlin will feature "History Now" (2016) as well as recent works such as "Conflict" (2022), "Plasma" (2021), and drawings on Bach's Goldberg Variations (2019) or John Cage (2021).
