Friederike Biebl: an archaeologist of existence
Published in New Art in Europe no: 70
2019
The following text came out of a conversation with Friederike Biebl via email and video call.
‘I think of my work as image-minutes.’
Friederike Biebl describes her artworks—mixed media collages that include painting, drawing, photography, stitching, staples and transparencies—as image-minutes (like the minutes taken in a meeting, for example). These image-minutes are the result of what she calls a ‘fictional dialogue’, she has with other artists, philosophers and writers. ‘I get a sentence and I think it through,’ she says. The example she gives me is: ‘things exist by mistake’, which she jotted down in her notebook while listening to a lecture by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek on YouTube. It is as if her work is in conversation with the world via key interlocuters such as Žižek, Silvia Plath, Louise Bourgeois, WOLS, Unica Zürn, Eva Hesse, Antonin Artaud, Maria Lassnig, and others. Her interest with these artist/thinkers is also filtered through the conversations she has with Schädelwaldt her partner, who is also a prolific artist and poet, and her close friends. Another key sentence she has worked with recently comes from one of Schädelwaldt’s poems: Tod, Transport ohne Fracht, which translates as ‘death transport with no freight.’ Biebl’s thinking, then, is constantly and deliberately in dialogue— with herself, with those in her immediate sphere, and with the writers and thinkers with whom she is interested in at the time.
‘My leading thought is: you have to charge the void to create anything.’
Biebl’s work is grounded in her interest in abstraction, the body, the void, praxis, psychoanalysis, repetition and disruption. The layering and preoccupation with bodily experience is such that her work sits comfortably within a strong tradition of feminist thought —Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray to name a few—and art-making practices.
‘I always work in my mind days or months before I start ‘work’ in the studio.’
Biebl’s art-making, then, is the material outcome of her engagement with complex ideas including what we might think of as ‘negative’ affect such as: disappointment, despair, mourning, fear and grief. Biebl says: ‘I think my paintings are human bodies, and I think a lot about how to let them move into the space.’
‘I try to use the phenomena of everyday life to make visible the various layers that structure our reality.’ As described above, Biebl is interested in representing the immeasurable and immaterial, yet somewhat every day, landscape of feeling. She says: ‘I am troubled by this overwhelming desire of humans to weigh and measure everything, especially money and power. In my work am weighing and measuring sensations of grief and yearning!’ She points out that we live in an era where we have access to technologies such as MRIs and Xrays that can ‘see’ through and into our bodies. The result is what Biebl describes as the ‘transparent and fully measured human.’ Her titles—which provide another key insight into her thinking—include several references to weighing and measuring, including: 185 Grams_seven centimeters of white distance. I feel secured. The use of transparencies as a material to print and to paint on, can be seen as further demonstration of Biebl’s interest in, and preoccupation with, measurement.
‘And, I love to disturb, to disrupt!’
Biebl describes the use of her staple gun—which she employs to fix the many layers of her images—as integral to the work, providing a ‘very aggressive’ action. ‘I couldn’t work without it,’ she says as she points out that the use of the gun (its sound, the pressure) emphasizes the bodily in her practice. By photographing details of her paintings and then printing them onto overhead transparencies to use again in the same and other artworks, Biebl explores repetition (incidentally a key psychoanalytic principle). Her use of repetition and indeed disruption, of layering and uncovering the essential and raw emotion of our bodily lives is perhaps why she thinks of her work as an archaeology of existence. Her work is an uncovering, a revealing, a reaching underneath, below the surface to the uncomfortable, anxious, unconscious and ineffable. Biebl is constantly excavating.
For more about Friederike Biebl’s artwork visit: https://friederikebiebl.weebly.com