Toni Schmale
Toni Schmale’s artistic oeuvre is focused primarily on the notion of sculpture and employs materials such as concrete, metal, or rubber. Her work also involves performative interventions, video, and graphic art. Schmale examines various social power relations and the gender norms or roles embedded therein. Her works deal with the perception of space and with how space can be used, extended, or altered by way of human intervention. Some works evoke associations with devices such as gym equipment and seem to invite viewers to try them out, though it soon becomes clear that there are no moving parts or
mechanisms that would endow these works with the implied functionalities. Their dysfunctionality stirs desires for physical strength or a hardly attainable perfect body as well as for utopian gender constellations. Such desires may be bifurcated into those of an either purely physical or indeed sexual nature. The latter possibility becomes more obvious in cases where the artist includes rubber as a constituent material in her work. Schmale’s sculptures reside at the threshold between the inner and outer selves, denoting imaginary aspects of the psyche that almost—but not quite—take shape in the real world. One series, which the artist presented at the Vienna Secession in 2017, is entitled “transitional objects.” It is the transformative power of the mind that leads to transitory manifestations within those outward realities that have been influenced by humankind for centuries, whether for good or for ill. Psychoanalytic approaches in which the Self and the Other intertwine so as to manifest as performative yet unmoving sculptures hence represent important components of Schmale’s work. As architectural interventions, these sculptures question the conditions of the surrounding space as well as the influence that architecture can have on people and vice versa. They challenge the mind in terms of how to perceive a built environment where things cannot be moved. These works thereby denote a twisted reality that tests our visual acuity vis-à-vis the world in which we live. W.S.
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