Speech for Alice Kammerlander
Good evening!
My name is Alexandra Hennig. I am an art historian and curator and I am delighted to be here at the Ministry of Artists with Doris and Bruno to say a few words about Alice Kammerlander's first solo exhibition.
First of all, Alice and I have known each other for a very long time and have become friends over the years. I'm not sure whether that's an ideal prerequisite for what I'm doing here... Can and should I put aside the girlfriend and bring out the art historian? Am I objective or rather biased? I simply wanted to try to concentrate fully on the works that had such an attractive, enigmatic and intense effect on me from the very beginning. These seductive, fragile porcelain objects that are so pleasing to the eye - which makes you want to pick them up and touch them straight away... But as is the case, these works - guided by the body, which Maria Lassnig aptly described as the "most real reality" available to an artist - tell complex and very personal stories, which in turn are inextricably linked to the artist herself, her body, her inner images and ideas.
Their contemplation sparks a round dance of associations and sensations, from magical attraction and lustful desire to deep revulsion and palpable disgust. Memories of kitschy, colourful, baroque porcelain figurines in her grandmother's display cabinet, which she was of course never allowed to touch, only to admire through the separating glass pane (in all their useless glory); as well as the challenges of finding her own emancipated approach to faith in a strongly religious environment; but also of early experiences of pain, such as a congenital scoliosis of the spine, a bleeding uterus, a cramping bowel obstruction...
Alice Kammerlander's porcelain objects bear such eloquent titles as: "Spinework", "Beautiful Digestion", "Humility", "Biting your tongue", "The self and I", "Garden of Eden", "Bowel loop bowl" or "Breathe"... Her work explores the

her work explores the shadowy realm of unconscious processes, turning the innermost outwards - the "perceptible not the visible", as she herself emphasises. With the utmost care and precision, she exposes physical sensations, feelings and pain and allows them to blossom in their ambivalent beauty. Like plants, she cherishes, nurtures and cares for her objects - devotedly and with scientific precision. She pays meticulous attention to the right dose of oxygen and moisture to give the material the ideal viscosity for processing, which often takes weeks. The theme of health, so important to the artist, always resonates - which for her presupposes the unity of mind, body and nature.
"Health is the silence of the organs" said the French philosopher and poet Paul Valéry.
According to this maxim, Alice Kammerlander's luxuriantly proliferating porcelain objects are neither silent nor healthy. Rather, they seem to scream and lash out. They bleed, they excrete, they breathe heavily, lash out greedily, claw, writhe, spasm and writhe in pain and obvious discomfort. As disturbing and disconcerting as the depicted organs and body parts - such as eyes, tongues, individual fingers or even nerve tracts, veins and fasciae - are staged, the floral set pieces in the form of calyxes, leaves and loops entwine themselves seductively and playfully, and counter them with relish.
The art of seduction is articulated in Kammerlander's works not least in the extraordinary skill with which she precisely explores and expands the possibilities of the material; for example, in the delicate, pastel colour palette made entirely from her own colours. As far as her colour spectrum is concerned, Alice has provided a valuable clue to a source of her inspiration: Hieronimus Bosch's enigmatic triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (1490-1500).
Between paradise and the underworld, heaven and hell, creation and apocalypse, dream and reality, Bosch's exuberant repertoire of phantasmagorical scenes and creatures is accompanied by an unprecedented variety of colours, which the artist accesses with relish. [Moreover, neither Bosch's garden of paradise nor Kammerlander's objects are devoid of ironic duplicity: paradise and ruin, healing plant or poison, psyche and physique, inside and outside,

inner and outer, disruption and harmony, none of this exists without its counterpart, everything is porous and inextricably interwoven...
One could argue that Alice Kammerlander breaks down the body into isolated parts in her works. In fact, the sciences proceed in a similar way.
I quote from an article by Wolf Lotter from a brand eins magazine (August 2021) on the subject of "bodies": "The Enlightenment, and thus the natural sciences, owe their progress to the fact that they have broken down the indeterminate whole into manageable parts. [...] We only understand the world when we take it apart in order to put it back together again for ourselves."
... and to rethink it... to understand the body - like the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, for example - as a "somatic feeling cosmos" and "stage of feelings".
In her highly subjective porcelain objects, Alice Kammerlander constantly rethinks the body, dismantles it, reassembles it again and again, amalgamates and externalises what is in it. On this path, as we can see here, she has already created a considerable body of artistic work - a young work in which the wisdom of half a lifetime and the vigour of a new departure are visible!
Thank you and enjoy the exhibition! Text: Alexandra Hennig