Johanna Magdalena Guggenberg’s practice dwells on the ordinary to unravel immersive stories about cultures and how they meet.

Selected Works

Mainly using sculptural processes, the materiality of Johanna’s work provokes contemplation; specifically, the contemplation of histories and their meanings. Across her sculptures, soft and hard forms juxtapose, creating space for narratives of co-existence freed from ideas of assimilation.

Exhibitions and series

STATT BIEDERMEIR

Kunstverein Baden, Austria, 2023

In the duo exhibition, STATT BIEDERMEIER, Johanna’s sculptural works are placed in dialogue with paintings by Martina Funder. Displayed in the ‘Living Room’ of the Kunstverein, the pair’s works playfully riff on the short-lived biedermeier movement—one associated with the flowering of middle-class cultural sensibilities.

Komme gleich

Wonnerth Dejaco Gallery, Vienna, 2022

The objects of the past, that the present designates as past but are not really past, are combined with things of the present. They are molded, cast, painted, stitched, they are hardened or softened, their materials are exchanged to create an architectural poetics, a homescape, ruled by a poetics of reproduction. Modernism’s ceaseless search for the new became fixed, integrated, and canonized. Johanna Magdalena Guggenberger’s repurposing shows us a way to recast modernism’s margin to include the untimely forms that ran and run continuous with the present, that were neglected and discarded, useless and abject. These forms are not intent on the new, but act as telescopes of time, transporting us to varied modes of production; they are tangible and sensual, recovered through a reproduction of poetics and a poetics of reproduction. The homescape is akin to a fairground, should we wish to repurpose the world along a poetic line.
—Rose-Anne Gush, 2023

Hand it Over
Belmacz, London, 2020

(anyways these days, days are only hours, sometimes really just minutes) — I’d need helping hands — I’d need to give way, sit down on a bench in the back staring at the state of clouds; conversation between wasps and roses; clearly, not everything will function, most of it will find its material; the soil, the stone, a vineyard; it should be about finding paths, where none seem to exist.
let me start a new conversation please.

—Johanna Magdalena Guggenberger

Skizze # of serie #

This is (not) the time (to get up and) walk away

Belmacz, London, 2017

this is (not) the time to (get up and) walk away is referring to a physical body as much as to an idealistic space, as much as to various objects and their intrinsic movement or stillness. While traveling or walking wherever to, Guggenberger finds it hard to ignore certain objects, like saddles or dusters or the crowns of dead saintly figures or rickshaw-covers or the sheepskin winter coats of shepherds or the goats of new year or megaphones or certain words and colors and surfaces.

Publications

This is (not) the time to (get up and) walk away

Artist bio

Johanna Magdalena Guggenberger (b.1985, Vienna, Austria), studied Social and Cultural Anthropology, Arabic and Islamic studies in both Vienna and Pakistan before joining the Fine Arts Academy Vienna to study under Pawel Althamer and Julian Goethe.

Working with seemingly quotidian objects, found following prolonged conversations, with people in places, Johanna seeks to get beyond objective thinking by re-casting her protagonists using sculptural processes. In this way, Johanna’s objects re-sediment both histories and meaning, creating room for new understandings, for contemplation and indeed for new experiences to arise.

Select exhibitions include: STATT BIEDERMEIR, Kunstverein, Baden, Austria (2023); Komme gleich, Wonnerth Dejaco Gallery, Vienna (2022); Beuys Open Source, Belmacz, London (2021); Hand it Over, Belmacz, London (2020); Estragon, Belmacz, London (2019); The Ashtray Show West, Belmacz, London (2018-19); Newjörg Immendorf, New Jörg, Dusseldorf (2018); this is (not) the time to (get up and) walk away, Belmacz, London (2017); blue monday on the moon, Republica des Artes, Vila Nova de Cerveira, Portugal (2016); Leisure as a Mechanism of Resistance, curated by Daily Lazy, fAN Vienna at Parallel Vienna (2016); Interkontinental, Belmacz, London (2016); und nun stehen also wir da (“and now it is us, a standing here”), Camera Matteotti, Vienna (2016); einige unwählbare wege. die gespräche der esel (“some inexplicable paths. the donkeys’ colloquy”), curated by Max Henry, Parallel Vienna Alte Post, Vienna (2015); VON WEGEN RASCH – sprachbewegte Bedeutungsziegen, Performance, altes Finanzamt, Vienna (2015); vom weg zum weg existiert ein weg (“from path to path exists a path”), Rundgang, Academie of fine arts, Vienna (2015); don’t fool & privatisez vous & baynatna, Public Performances, Beirut (2014).

Johanna currently lives and works in Vienna.