For Gerold Tagwerker, urban architecture presents realms full of new experiences. Which is why he uses industrially manufactured materials from the building trade in his art. Apart from constructional timber, aluminium profiles, galvanised grilles and fluorescent tubes, for over twenty years now he has employed mirror surfaces, which he prepares in a variety of ways. And he often combines these materials all in one piece.

Shattered, blemished, or with bore holes for screws that have produced hairline cracks which evoke capricious drawings, the reflections in glass or foils only manage to create a limited illusion of depth. As with the artist’s light objects, whose flickering often only comes in phases so as to give the impression of being faulty, just like the “soundtrack” from the constantly clattering starting motors, the various modifications to the mirrors are likewise aimed at baffling the viewer and his perceptual faculties.

Mounted between the square surfaces of the mirror in the background and the plain glass at the front of Tagwerker’s grid.portrait is a galvanised grille of the kind used as a sturdy, functional cover for holes in the ground and light shafts in outdoor architecture. This material, which is commonly used in the construction trade, undergoes an unexpected ennoblement here. The likewise square structure that makes up the metal grille is not simply reflected by the mirror behind it, it also turns the reflection of the viewer looking into the object from without into a gridded image: consequently, the beholder is not sucked into one single depth that reflects his figure, but split up into lots of smaller square spaces. With this, the resulting image of the person threatens to get lost in a kind of miniature labyrinth, into an utterly claustrophobic hall of mirrors.

The spatially staggered arrangement of variously coated panels (transparent glass, galvanised steel grille, vaporised glass) recalls moreover the optical system inside camera bodies, where light and shade are cast onto photographic paper or film rolls. In this way impulses from the cinematic techniques of film noir, which have strongly influenced Gerold Tagwerker’s work, along with the mirror surface as material and metaphor in general, as well as the analogy of the digital pixel image, are all linked up across several levels.

Gerold Tagwerker

1965 born in Feldkirch
Lives and works in Vienna