Yves Netzhammer

Addresses of Impossible Places

August 23 - October 4 2009

When it comes to finding an appropriate visual medium with which to communicate internal pictures, feelings and emotions, the computer is still the most important instrument for Yves Netzhammer. But the cool and sober language of this medium is by no means due to the artist's fascination with the artificial; it is more like a tool of neutralisation that is capable of revealing universal structures and processes behind contingent reality. The innumerable variations that come to life as animations and computer drawings mark associative fields that condense and form themselves into a complicated net of references within the draft process. The way this net materialises into a form starts from the computer drawings and leads to sculptures, murals and complex installations. As in most of Netzhammer's shows, also in Addresses of Impossible Places an animated video is the core of the whole show; but the sculptures and installations develop some aspects of the animation further and recontextualise them as three-dimensional spatial arrangements. Whereas the neutral language of the computer animation makes the individual human being lose some of their unique features (and gain some universal ones at the same time), the objects and even whole landscapes become animated in the truest sense of the word. They become capable of engaging in a direct dialogue with human beings or else they turn into material representations of human longings, fears and wishes.

Oliver Kielmayer