Nana Mandl, sometimes i feel like love might win (Detail), 2015
mixed media on digital print on canvas, 190 × 130 cm, courtesy the artist
The artist Nana Mandl (born 1991 in Graz, lives in Berlin and Vienna) elaborates, in her bright material collages, possible visual realisations of present-day media challenges and overloads. The exhibtion "shuffle repeat" features works shown for the first time in Graz, sometimes very tactile collages unifying elements of painting with forms of communicative, representational advertising, fashion, and social media. Some of the artist’s earlier works ("graveyard I", "life and death", "maybe a love stick", "follow the spaceship, donkey", all 2012) still sounded out in analogue ways these levels of representation in exhibiting the works (on drawing paper, for instance, partially protected by glass, set against different wall textures and employing photographs).
In the artist’s images shown on the upper floor of the side wing of the Künstlerhaus, der Halle für Kunst & Medien all of the isolated levels of showing visual elements now come together, opulently and laden with information and reinforce references to the circulation of images and the speed of this circulation. They seem as if they haven’t yet found their final form, as if one could watch them as they take on their shapes, and at the same time one can see how strongly they rely upon this state of being circulated and reproduced.
