Magdalena Frauenberg

Magdalena Frauenberg develops hybrid, symbolically charged visual languages by confronting and uniting the present and the past, tradition and transformation. The materials, techniques and media she uses are as diverse as the references she draws on. Sculptures, photographs, texts, drawings and video works are woven together into expansive installations that often appear as stage-like ensembles. Magdalena Frauenberg combines folkloric motifs with art-historical and pop-cultural references, engages with both perception theories and psychoanalysis, and repeatedly explores the question of how cultural and social images first enter and then perpetuate themselves in our collective consciousness. She translates all this into areas of tension between the familiar and the surreal, between technological precision and poetic openness, creating works in which perception, memory and presence intertwine.
In her exhibition in the Schaufenster junge Kunst she translates these themes into a spatial reflection on the ‘double’. The starting point is the psychoanalytical idea of the uncanny – the interplay between familiarity and strangeness – which Laura Mulvey applies to cinema. Viewers enter a dark room in which only the works are illuminated. A large-format photograph shows not a person, but a studio situation. A still life of research, drawing and text, which can be interpreted as traces of artistic preparation. A twin room, in which the identical photo can be seen, reinforces the idea of doubling and questions the relationship between original and reproduction. The ensemble is accompanied by the figure of the ‘sower,’ which appears as a small wall drawing and is a symbol of cyclical change, renewal, and continuous becoming in the process of artistic creation.

Exhibition opening: Saturday, November 15th, 2025, 6 p.m.
As part of the Long Night of Museums

Curator: Hannah Eckstein

The exhibitions in the Schaufenster junge Kunst are supported by the Helmut Fischer Foundation.