Paul Petritsch & Nicole Six

b. 1971 & 1968, Austria

Architecture and sculpture are grounded. Buildings and three-dimensional works of art stand on the ground, are erected on foundations or placed on bases. Their links with the earth are just as important as their vertical extension. It surely cannot be accidental that, since time immemorial, metaphors of standing, sitting and lying as applied to buildings and sculpture have been widely used to express certain thoughts. Building on solid ground would appear to be a logical metaphor of safety and stability. By contrast, classic Western thought lacks verbal imagery for expressing phenomena of an inherently different kind, for qualities that combine the firm with the movable, the architectural with the psychological, the established with the unfathomable.

These phenomena, rather than conventional architectural categories, are what matter to Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch. They focus not on erecting, installing or siting, but on existential conditions in which stability has begun to crumble, in which security is undermined in order to allow states of disorientation to be registered and investigated. The two artists like to render such states through the depiction of space. A lack of firm structuring and a feeling of bewilderment become especially apparent in spaces that have neither boundaries nor coordinates. Such sensations also occur in situations that disrupt human actions and perceptions, either rendering them useless or at least seriously threatening them. Six and Petritsch subject themselves, and hence the viewer, to extreme conditions of this kind. In their work they generally expose themselves to states of risk in which they are apparently deprived of space, in which bearings are lost and automatic assumptions no longer apply.

— Thomas Trummer

(Text: reading the city catalogue, 2009)