Sophie von Hellermann | Get Your Head Around It: Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna

Sophie von Hellermann (b. 1975, Munich) has created an extensive new work on canvas for the 62-metre vitrine on the south-west wall of the Kunsthalle’s building. Von Hellermann’s paintings quote fact and fiction, drawing diversely from history and culture to develop expansive, narrative compositions. Using broad-brushes to apply acrylic and raw pigment on unprimed canvas, her images are imbued with a luminosity and a sense of movement and weightlessness that contributes to their fleeting, dream-like or cinematic quality. 

The title, Get Your Head Around It pays tribute to the writer, cybernetician, language theorist and musician Oswald Wiener (b. 1935, Vienna; d. 2021, Steiermark) with whom von Hellermann studied Erkenntnistheorie (epistemology) while at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1990s. The work is inspired by a conversation between the artist and her tutor, referring to Wiener’s theory that the mind functions like a machine processing mental imagery in programmed sequences that guide the movement of ‘signs’ or information.