Brigitte Kowanz

Brigitte Kowanz (* 1957) lives and works in Vienna. She studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 1975 to 1980. Since 1997 she holds a professorship at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In the year 2009 Brigitte Kowanz received the Grand Austrian State Prize and in 2015 she received the Cultural Award of Lower Austria 2015 – Honorary Prize for Visual Arts. She participated in numerous international individual and group exhibitions. Brigitte Kowanz is representing Austria at the 57th Venice Art Biennale in 2017.

At the center of the work of Brigitte Kowanz is the theme space and light since the 1980s. Since 1995 Kowanz has been using the Morse alphabet for coding, among other things – starting with simple line-dot combinations. As a binary code, it is the source of information transmission with light. In her recent work, Kowanz uses (semi-) transparent glasses and mirrors. In their three-dimensional objects, this leads to a manifold superposition of virtuality and reality. The interplay of light, language and mirrors creates hybrid spaces whose boundaries seem to be clearly defined in a moment, but which are already resolved in the next.