NYAB Event - Maria Bussmann “Either Way”

Maria Bussmann “Either Way”

frosch & portmann

This event has ended.

frosch&portmann presents Either Way, Maria Bussmann’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show includes two distinct series of recent drawings by the Vienna (Austria) and New York based artist.

The first series is an artistic response to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), a significant work of the twentieth century where the philosopher explores the relationship between language and reality. The Tractatus consists of meticulously numbered philosophical terms—declarative statements rather than elaborate arguments; these keywords lost their context and thus the original text is no longer recognizable, the inner logic reduced ad absurdum. By assigning a drawing to each term, Bussmann reveres this process and adds context again. This series is a work in progress and like the first proposition of the Tractatus “The world is the totality of facts, not of things,” Maria Bussmann’s visualization of the concordance could aim to a ‘world as the totality of images’. Currently, the series has completed the letter A and consists of 60 drawings.

In contrast to her concordance project, the artist’s “Lucky Numbers”, colorful pennants, seem like a banal idea at first. But the triangle shaped drawings are nothing like the commercially available colorful buntings seen at car vendors or suburban shopping malls. Bussmann’s pennants are subtly colored and each number carefully drawn onto the ruled notepaper. The artist meticulously re-creates an everyday object into a precious and unique work of art. The “Lucky Numbers” can be freely and individually arranged—to each his or her own lucky number in his or her preferred color.

Both series illustrate Maria Bussmann’s playful as well as profound approach to komplex themes; they offer to broaden our perception of the world—here the reinvention of meaning in the concordance drawings, there the numbers and colors in endless variation-possibilities.
Maria Bussmann works at the intersection of art and philosophy.

Born in 1966 in Würzburg (Germany), she lives in Vienna (Austria) and New York. She holds a PhD. in Philosophy.