OPENING: 11. NOV | 19.00 Uhr

Austraße 14, 96047 Bamberg

Helga Schmidhuber (*1972, Wiesbaden) often uses found objects from flora and fauna as a starting point for her sculptures and paintings, which she grows into expansive installations. To this end, she creates collages from taxidermy, skulls, and feathers or creates imaginative installations from animal paintings on geometric awning fabrics.

Painting is the main focus of her experimental, multimedia work. The elements of several, overlapping image layers come together to form a New Image. The central motif is again animals, not in their natural environment, but in an abstract, energetically charged field of tension. Does this show the threat or the auratic radiance of these individuals? This question remains open. The affinity to the animal world and to natural sciences has existed since Schmidhuber’s childhood. According to Schmidhuber, many phenomena that exist in nature can be transferred to the conditions and realms of human existence.

With the exhibition IN POTENTIA, AOA;87 dedicates a solo exhibition to the artist and takes us into the mysterious and fantastic world of Helga Schmidhuber. In addition to the exhibition in the gallery premises, Austraße 14, there is an artistic intervention at the same time in the Natural History Museum Bamberg, Fleischsstraße 2 – right next door.

IN POTENTIA describes the power inherent in individual materials or objects that, when put together, create a whole; thus the feather becomes a chieftain’s ornament, the skull a cult object, many layers of paint a painting. IN POTENTIA presents a carefully curated cross-section of Schmidhuber’s oeuvre: objects, paintings, installations, and collages, and how everything comes together to form a new unity in a new context.