Raphaela Vogel

KRAAAN

18 February 2023 - 27 August 2023
work in collection

An all-consuming vortex, a sports car with the eyes of a cat and a carnivalesque procession of ten giraffes. The work of the German artist Raphaela Vogel offers a gateway to surprising worlds that upend all your prior knowledge and ideas. In only a short time, Vogel (Nuremberg, 1988) has captured the attention of the international art world with her large-scale installations, in which sculpture, painting, experimental videos and music all flow together to yield a theatrical whole. The resulting works pose provocative questions about topics ranging from gender to the possibility of relationships between people, animals and machines, and from monumental sculpture and the privilege enjoyed by artists to the position of women in a male-dominated world – and art world.

The exhibition KRAAAN – written with three ‘A’s so as to encompass both the Dutch (kraan) and German (Kran) words for ‘crane’ – offers an overview of Vogel’s work, from early experiments with film to recent installations. It also devotes attention to a few sources of her inspiration, including a socially-engaged 1981 film by the German director Helke Sander. In the film, a woman with two children scales a crane in an act of pure desperation motivated by the crushing costs of rent and the housing shortage.

For Vogel, the slender construction of a crane – which seems to stretch toward the heavens – relates to her interest in the questions around the idea of hubris, a Greek word meaning pride or arrogance, as in the misplaced pride of mere mortals who dare compare themselves to the gods. This same concept serves as a common thread running through the exhibition, which includes monumental works such as Rollo (2019) (an installation that enables the visitor to stroll between iconic architectural models that were once part of a theme park), A Woman’s Sports Car (2018) and Können und Müssen (Ability and Necessity) (2022). Vogel guides you through her work like a modern-day oracle. Her mysterious and prophetic visuals – often accompanied by her own music – sow doubt and offer no unambiguous answers. This explains, perhaps, why the works linger in your mind, even after you have left the exhibition behind.