During her walks through the city, Veronika Kellndorfer discovers how the reflection of the Mühlendamm bridge combines with the stone bridge itself to form an eye-like structure. She returns with her camera to capture precisely this moment, when the water is calm enough for the adjacent facade to be reflected in the eye of the bridge as a slightly trembling line structure. It is about the motif, but above all about the connection between the motif and the place: a sense of place. The photograph of the mirrored bridge creates an ambivalence between supposed reality and reflection. Suddenly an eye looks at the viewer, then it recedes in perception and becomes all wallpaper, all wall on wall, graffiti on graffiti, water in front of water. Trompe l’oeil, you can see a complex play with the figure of the bridge, which again becomes the ground of the wall, vertically mirrored with the real bridge that the eye falls on as soon as you turn around. The title “Arch and Reflection” refers to a work by Ellsworth Kelly, who discovered a similar optical phenomenon on the Seine.
Veronika Kellndorfer, born in Munich in 1962, studied painting and art history in Vienna and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Based on the idea that the past and present of a society can be read from its buildings, the artist explores built structures and the transfer of architecture into painting in architecture.
She has held scholarships at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, the Villa Massimo in Rome and the Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto, as well as being a fellow at the IKKM of the Bauhaus University Weimar. She has had solo exhibitions at the Techné Sphere, Leipzig; the VDL-Neutra-House, Los Angeles; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Mies van der Rohe Haus, Berlin; the National Museum Oslo; the Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica; the Casa de Vidro/Instituto Lina Bo Bardi, São Paulo and the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich. Her works can be found in numerous public collections such as the: Art Institute Chicago; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen; Berlinische Galerie; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; LACMA, LA; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; SFMOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland; The J. Paul Getty Museum, LA.
