Stephanie Pflaum: Haut (Skin)

The oeuvre of Austrian artist Stephanie Pflaum (*1971) offers a broad span from its beginnings in painting in the 1990s to the art of assemblage: condensed collages of materials build up in symbolic object and space installations.

Skin as a multi-layered organic tissue represents being human with all its implications, unabashedly revealing hidden contents and protectively covering the all-too-obvious. Such a double meaning also forms the basis of Freud’s interpretation of the Uncanny. The analyst attributes this “class of the terrifying” to cozily familiar as well as secretly repressed material. He thinks this wide range of the emotion is due to the duality of the word “heimlich”, “the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.” The same is true in Stephanie Pflaum’s art: in detailed and elaborate needlework she conveys these seeming opposites that actually condition our lives as parallel forces and states—resistance and vulnerability, becoming and fading.

Also Freud’s assertion that it is mainly the “unknown nature” of the Uncanny which provokes terror in us is corroborated by Pflaum’s work: the pretty fiction Skin offers in the light of its shining pearls and gemstones is broken as soon as we discern what lies under its surface and sheltered within it: organs with their blood supply, hairy set pieces, and softly shimmering embryos.

The work was conceived for the Showroom Berggasse 19 on the occasion of the exhibition „The Uncanny. Sigmund Freud and Art“ and will be on display untl October 2025.

 

Stephanie Pflaum: Haut (Skin)
Showroom Berggasse 19
April 2024 to October 2025