Comment on the work of
Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz

Text by Christina Irrgang

Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz generate scenarios of the juxtaposition of nature, texture, body and space, mass, form and substance. The artist duo generates reflective moments that shift between moving images, virtual scupltures and snapshots. Technological tools that have become an integral part of contemporary society serve as source and material – the computer becomes a tool and the interactions with it the subject of their work. The human being free in his choice and with his computer technological possibilities (as a subject and as an avatar) form again and again a reference point when generating forms in the visual (re)-construction of diversity and the digital image of what presents itself as “real”.

In Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz series of ”body paintings”, the body becomes the shaping pulse. Recordings of body movements in space are coupled with fluid simulations. The generated forms follow the movement of people, translating physical body language into a transparent-digital gesture, settling in an amorphous body of color. These pigments, which find their form in picturesque expressions, do not stand alone. Transition of shapes are repeated at different times and spaces, then reorganized and expressed in a potential picture-moment that remains flexibel.
Thus, the individual prints are crystallizations from these movements (opposed to moving images) – they exist as situational shots that Bowinkel & Banz situationally link in their presentation. Using a tool for computer-based perception of reality (augmented reality) the artists place another digital layer over the two-dimensional picture of the real exhibitional space and point once again to the complexity of vision: The image is a virtual sculpture, which is only created through the movement of its viewer and varies its shape reflecting the individual’s action in the space. While observing the image reference points arise between the image and human, opening a scope of a definitions, compositions and expansions of reality.

Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz continuously suggest declinations of virtual and real spaces. Dimensions, consistency and matter are transformative in their artistic works, they overlap and flow into their pictures, videos and installation, coming together as autonomous parameters. Freedom within the system is an ever present subject. Held up high by their own image models, with a constant connection to the viewer while receiving feedback of reality and letting the reflection become real.