LOOKING BACK

LOOKING BACK (Der Blick zurück)

Looking Back questions the roles between watching and performing, unsettling the boundary between observer and observed. The premise of the exhibition builds around the work of two photographers, Michael Ziegler (Innsbruck) and Rita Lino (Milan), presenting contrasting male and female perspectives, in which the camera becomes a tool through which intimacy, desire, and projection converge. 

Michael Ziegler works with drawing, painting, and photography as distinct bodies of work.  His photographic work has focused on his “Analog double and multiple exposures” since 2007. Utlising multiplication, exposure, and the integration of his own body into the photographic camera-subject-image constellation, thereby opening up a return to the original possibilities of photography. He uses this ‘doubling’ to question the situational aspects of photography by consciously introducing chance. 

Rita Lino is an artist and fashion photographer and her works often blur the lines between the two disciplines, with her self-portraits informing her work for fashion magazines and labels. Presented here are her ‘Polaroid Diaries’ an ongoing series of very immediate snapshots that depict both her personal life as well as her imagined life of subconscious desires. By subjecting her own body/image to the ‘Male gaze’ it allows her to understand how images function more critically.. Stating that “sometimes when I work with models for commercial projects, I see myself in the positions I ask them to take.”

Complementing these positions are sculptural works by Richard Hoeck, Ute Müller, Octavian Trauttmansdorff and Danijel Radić, which extend and materialize these themes. Fragmented bodily forms and crafted objects worn close to the body—evoke states of obsession, voyeurism, and tactile desire, giving physical presence to what is otherwise only seen.

Richard Hoeck is known for his mannequin sculptures (often in collaboration with John Miller), which suggest a body that is available to the gaze, yet devoid of agency. Here with a sculpture entitled “Debris” he presents only ‘body parts', with casts of hands and arms. Displayed, not as lifeless specimens of a cadaver, but the body in moments of physical ecstasy. 

Ute Müller will present her small, delicate paintings concealed architecturally behind a peephole—a device that both restricts and directs the act of viewing. In doing so, it charges the role of the viewer, rendering access intimate and controlled. Even without this mechanism, her works are stripped of conventional support structure, her paintings often merge with the wall itself—less like images, more like skins stretched flat against the surface.

Octavian Trauttmansdorff  works with photographic images but generally in a sculptural context presenting the human form in relation to social space. His images are often fragmented and blurred to reflect time and space. In this show we are presenting earlier works  (from the late 80s- early 90s) documenting figures interacting with sculptures, during this time he collaborated with Franz West and Günter Förg. These ‘Bildhauerphotografien’ are more about the use and interaction with sculptures than documenting the sculptures themselves. 

Danijel Radić, trained as a fashion designer, approaches his approach to shoe design more sculpturally—cutting, shaping, and assembling materials around the last, a three-dimensional model of the foot. His handmade, custom shoes—crafted from diverse materials such as cow leather and fish skin—extends the exhibition’s engagement with the body. If Hoeck isolates the erotic symbolism of the hand, Radić turns to the foot: a form at once intimate and grounded, shaped through touch, pressure, and wear. Positioned between object and extension of the body, these works suggest a form that is not only seen, but inhabited—bringing the register of desire from the visual into the tactile.