Ulli Knall

The installation "Venus Garden" was part of a group exhibition by the La La international art collective with the title "What this awl means", Künstlerhaus Bregenz 2023. It is the result of three years of producing lighthearted, colorful ceramic sculptures of flora and fauna interspersed with mythical creatures. Situated at the center of the installation is a large plant-shaped fountain. The green water that moves through the fountain produces a serene gurgling sound underpinned by birdsong. The central table was guarded by larger singular sculptures placed on plinths alongside the walls. By bringing together a multitude of figures and details, the installation deliberately evokes a slight sense of overwhelm, inviting viewers to pause, linger, and take time to read – or even invent – the relationships between the individual sculptures.

about the exhibition: What This Awl Means

The LaLa International Art Collective :

Christiane Bergelt

Liz Elton

Ulli Knall

Vanessa Mitter

Paige Perkins

And Guests:

Flora Bilgeri

Mila Bjelik-Stöhr

Anne Marie Jehle

Gesine Probst-Bösch

The LaLa International Art Collective and Guests

To me, the world is steeped in sticky good taste and ignorance.

Francis Picabia, 'Half Asses', I Am A Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation

The present moment is an explosion

a scission of past and future

Mina Loy, 'Time-Bomb', The Lost Lunar Baedeker

The call of absurdity is all.

"Did I tell you I can hear loud voices coming from the room next door? I didn't think so. The chamber no longer exists. In all of this, there is only one thing that petrifies me, and that is the possibility that I could be hearing the voices. What if they are not real?"

The living artists in the LaLa International Art Collective, and in this exhibition, tease out multiple histories, prising them from their ancestors. The esoteric gesture alludes to hidden worlds; glimpsed through a cacophony of curlicues and swirls. These associations find their apotheosis in the impulse of collective accident and instinct. No sooner has a precariously stitched together collection of flowing fabrics, as installation, caught the eye of the viewer, than one's senses are confronted by a twisted and hypnotic universe of signs, symbols, birds, trees, figures; all deliriously dancing; as if in a trance. Further to this, the viewer’s gaze is met by the contradiction of seemingly mutable clay. Figures abound. Objects that look like cornucopias; grotesque, gargogyle-like, bulbous females, multifaceted Sheila na gig types too timid, perhaps, to reveal all; creatures spewing forth, botanical structures, strange hybrid forms, curious, Lilliputian men; all spilling out as if driven by their own organic internal logic.

Large-scale paintings playfully ignite the history of gestural abstraction. These coalesce with the more ethereal, sombre monuments to colour-field painting by another contemporary painter in the exhibition. It all adds up to a jarring of signs and conversations between the living and the dead.

The interplay between the present and the deceased reaches its zenith in small, intimate artworks, and in bold experiments that merge Pop art sensibility with Fluxus, as well as in a striking, silver-spooned, Surrealist seeming object.

La…La.. La…La.. La......Sing-song. Childlike. Rather like Dada….Da…da……da……….da…..dada; a child’s first word repeated endlessly, also an Art Movement and no accident. Banal, but shrill. LaLa is similar, but softer, like its feminine equivalent. Not mama, but lala. It is a tune that thrashes around in one's head, beating a path in to one's consciousness. Consonent. Vowel. Consonent. Vowel. Slow start. Impetuous impulse. Slow start, followed by impetuous impulse. We hear the clamour of voices colliding in this exhibition, both loud, rancorous, shrill and softly spoken; whispering cadences to us through time. Each viewer will react differently. Some will receive a faint tintinnabulation of a distant ring. Others will experience clamour; discordance.

Quietly, in the closed coffin of desire, a universe of nameless shapes and forms spring forth, on paper and on canvas; small; intimate. These speak of what painting's possibilities could be today; freed from the echo chamber of heroic possession. These are ambiguous and complex murmurings, reverberating through time.

At once pithy, visionary, concocted, incidental, complex, absurd, awkward, frivolous, simple, severe; the artists in the LaLa International Art Collective look the past dead in the eye, playfully questioning their collective inheritance.

Furthermore, Bergelt, Knall, Mitter, Elton and Perkins, who form the collective, borrow works by deceased female artists from the collection of the Vorarlberg Museum that are connected to their own approaches.

As a curatorial intervention, a dialogue is created in which the individual artists speak to each other across time, cutting through and in to historical context(s), thereby constructing inventive platforms for an interrogation of the visual.