Brunhilde Bordeaux-Groult
« works with darkly stained wood, from which she releases drawings in delicate subtractive carving processes. In parallel to this practice she layers and adds materials to create embroideries on different kinds of textiles. Her pictorial language oscillates between abstract and figurative qualities. Repeatedly, human outlines fizzle out into vegetal or crystalline structures. Often her works recall the concept of the ‚Anima Mundi‘, a central idea to historical Romanticism’s philosophy of nature. A crucial point of reference for her is the poet Novalis‘ notion that all living beings on earth sprung from the same source and together form a unified whole. She relates this figure of thought to the alchemistic teachings of transmutability, which are an equal focus of her studies. On a formal level in her work, Bordeaux-Groult negotiates between models of order on the one hand, and, on the other, the suggestion of fluid potentials which can perforate beyond seemingly fixed conditions. One group of reoccurring forms she employs are schematic – circles, octagons and shield-like forms, which historically emerged from the ambition to define totalities. The artist challenges these symbols of boundary-defined totality by invading them with her vegetal and crystalline drawings, the fluid and transgressive energy of which seems to strive beyond them. Some of these lively drawings almost seem to illustrate microbiological processes, some resemble lichen, a hybrid life form that consists of both algae and mushrooms and, due to its ability to survive in outer space, seems destined to cross even the boundaries between worlds. Brunhilde Bordeaux-Groult’s work hauntingly asserts life’s uncontainability and its ambiguous consequences: immense vigor as well as a fundamentally symbiotic constitution which unifies the fate of all living beings in fragile entanglements. »
Text d’Agnes Scherer