Iris van Dongen

From 24th February onwards, visitors to Studio 3 of the Künstlerhaus will find themselves captivated by a sombre kind of Romanticism. Iris van Dongen’s large-format drawings jumble iconographies and symbols, and desires and moral judgements, until finally all opposites and criteria are abolished, compelling the viewer to seek his own standpoint. Death’s head symbols appear repeatedly; sometimes they seem to evolve almost by chance from the objects of the picture, sometimes they decorate the protagonists’ clothing. The outcome is a black Romanticism, whose ambivalence develops largely through the various levels of drawing technique; pastel chalks, charcoal and gouache are overlapped so that the image only emerges as a final synthesis. Thus the abolition of limits and of the temporal scale is also visualised in a very material way.