Bernd Oppl’s works explore issues of perception, physical and media spaces, and the orders of perception producing these spaces.
Bernd Oppl uses the medium of the model to invoke a space situated between reality and the imagination. He simulates everyday spatial situations where the perspective shifts and disorient our perception, highlighted in moments, almost crystalizing the real. He focuses on the interstices and the moments of transition as a grey zone of experience in which uncertainty prevails. These empty architectural spaces staged by the artist drift into the realm of the uncanny and mysterious.
Bernd Oppl, born 1980 in Innsbruck, lives and works in Vienna. Main solo shows: 2016 “Intermission”, Galerie Krinzinger, AUT, 2015: Kunstraum Goethestrasse, Linz, AUT, 2014: Georgia Museum of Arts, USA, RLB Atelier Lienz, AT, Amstel 41, Amsterdam, NL , 2013: artpartments, Vienna, AT, 2012: Neue Galerie, Innsbruck, AT, 2010: MQ- Artist Quarterly, Sotheby’s, Vienna, AT, 2009: Kunstverein das weisse haus, Vienna, AT.
Substanzaufnahme
HD Video / 08:00 min / 2017
Sterile spaces, white walls, black doors, no people. A glowing black liquid sloshes in, spreads out slowly across the floor, swallows the white and shapes into a plastic form. Voluminous substances, foreign, soulful, mysterious – eerie, grotesque bodies that disturb the usual perception of space.
Passage
HD Video / 04:00 min / 2013
“Passage” consists of three video sequences in which moving different elements in the room initially creates the illusion that the recording camera is moving. The room elements – a space-filling black square, a mirror that doubles the room – do not only move in one direction, at first away from the camera, but also back towards the camera. By no later than the second movement the illusion collapses in parts. All three sequences merely hint at the illusion of camera movement intentionally without really acquitting it, but also without completely dismantling it. This way, “Passage” creates a state of floatation of sorts in which illusion is generated while at the same time its production method is visible to a certain degree.