With their work, Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler attempt to build bridges between the general and the particular, norm and deviation, between the real world and the artificial. An important aspect of this is that personal authorship is no longer decisive. Works, often made after months in collaboration with disadvantaged people or prisoners, are brought together into installations. We are dealing here with a weave of material leftovers, wool and threads that fill the room like a net, with a wardrobe filled with clothes, circles of letters forming their own texts in a typeface designed by the authors, woven textiles, and also paintings and drawings. Connecting the different works is a process which takes an unlimited amount of time and which can be prolonged. Large coloured pencil drawings are one constant. The motives are usually schematic pictures of women and quotations from nature. Formally, they are reminiscent of Jugendstil impetus. As far as content is concerned, one often has the impression that the drawings are about the visualisation of dreams or are pictorial materialisations of memories of literature and text excerpts. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is a text of this nature, concerning a woman’s thoughts and feelings. Woolf moulded the subconscious desires of her heroine into a remarkable linguistic system of consciously explicit symbolism which can be recognised in some of the Hohenbüchler drawings.

Brigitte Huck, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)