From Everyday Materials to Immersive Spatial Experiences
From the very beginning of her career in the 1980s, Brigitte Kowanz engaged with everyday experience and referenced artistic approaches developed by figures such as Marcel Duchamp at the start of the 20th century. She made the leap toward wall- and space-based objects through the use of neon tubes and bottles filled with fluorescent and phosphorescent light sources. Drawing on elements of underground culture—ranging from new wave music and hallucinogenic experiences to a rebellious punk attitude—her work intersected with experimental film, video art, and the growing interest in virtual realities.

Kowanz maintained a lifelong interest in states that defy clear categorization—transitions, in-between spaces, and ambivalences. Her focus was on the “transformation of cognitive and emotional energy,” as she herself described it. Transcending traditional media and reflecting on new ones, expanding into three-dimensionality, creating immersive installations, and exploring the relationships between light, language, codes, space, and time became key aspects of her visionary art.

Infinity and Beyond
At the heart of her work lies an exploration of light and the speed of light—an inquiry that connects real and virtual realities through the use of mirrors and touches on the concept of infinity. Infinity and Beyond was the title of her contribution to the Austrian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Through stylistic devices such as reflective surfaces, viewers are directly addressed and become integral components of the artworks. Unstable, fleeting, and dynamic images emerge as spaces of possibility—offering ways to understand a hybrid reality and an accelerated present.

In the oeuvre of this pioneering media artist, word and image play a central role. Her interest in language and in old and new sign systems is evident in numerous works involving Morse code, where she transmits messages using light. Morse code represents an early binary system that enabled the first transmission of information via the speed of light across long distances. Through the rhythm of short and long, on and off, in the interplay between presence and absence, and the simultaneity of sending and receiving, information is conveyed. In this sense, Morse code is the foundation of today’s digital information society and its rapid pace. Works like Email 02.08.1984 03.08.1984 (referencing the date of the first transmitted email), www 12.03.1989 06.08.1991, or Wikipedia 15.01.2001 are artistic reflections on telecommunications innovations and their far-reaching impact on different generations—an evolution that Kowanz anticipated and accompanied in her art through light. The exploration of virtual, digital, and imaginary spaces reaches a literally luminous climax in this exhibition: radiant objects unfold their effect, expanding across the halls with luminous intensity and making a new reality perceptible.

A Work Between Emancipation and Magic
For this retrospective at the ALBERTINA, spaces are presented using mirrors and works that reflect into infinity. The exhibition showcases a dialectical body of work that unites opposites and oscillates between contrasts: materiality and immateriality, enlightenment and mystification, emancipation and magic. In a blacklight space evoking a club-like atmosphere, phosphorescent and fluorescent works fully come to life. These are immersive, space-within-space constructions. A gallery of early works presents, for the first time, pieces such as Polaroid photographs and rediscovered modular objects created in collaboration with her partner Franz Graf between 1979 and 1984.

Brigitte Kowanz’s outstanding œuvre revolves around the dematerialization of the art object and the visualization of immateriality, transience, and the boundlessness of light. At the core of this work, with its signaling character, lies a question that is as simple as it is radical: What is light?
“Light is what we see,” was the artist’s answer. This statement points to a central paradox: light makes everything visible—yet remains mostly invisible itself. Kowanz masterfully addresses this invisibility—and makes it visible in a powerful and evocative way through her work.

Curators: Angela Stief and Adrian Kowanz

(From the ALBERTINA Vienna press release, 2025)

For more information on the exhibition, click here.

Discover available works by Mary Heilmann at Häusler Contemporary here.