Anna Heindl Frenzi Rigling Elisabeth von Samsonow Nives Widauer

The exhibition Kosmos with works by the artists Anna Heindl, Frenzi Rigling, Elisabeth von Samsonow and Nives Widauer was curated by Sabine Fellner.

Anna Heindl – crossover artist between art forms

To explore the immensity of the universe, to conceive it and relate to it has always fascinated astrologers, philosophers, scientists from various disciplines, poets and fine artists.

“Planets, moons, orbits, binary stars, satellites that orbit Earth and letters to space” are all topics in Anna Heindl’s Kosmos, a series of jewellery sculptures she has been making continually since 2018, dealing intensively with the universe. Thus, her necklace Andromeda visualises the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years away and closest to the Milky Way, and another necklace in red-gold, stainless steel and silver, studded with rubies and olivine, depicts the path of the stars. A ring models the planet Saturn with its distinct, bright rings and its moon Titan. Another shows Venus, its orbit closest to Earth at a distance of 38 million kilometres. In her jewellery universe, Anna Heindl has visions of images and materialises them in her unique handwriting, in a form both precise as well as poetic. Celestial bodies of immense dimensions with mysterious shapes and structures, from an infinitely faraway universe, are captured, domesticated and presented in the form of small, precious sculptures, placed on a chain, nestled up against a wrist or slipped onto a finger. Invigorating and inspiring, the small artworks in this series connect the wearer of the pieces with the cosmos. But they are also liberating, as they transport their owners out of a world often full of pressure and allow for a view back onto Earth from a great distance.

With her jewellery sculptures, Anna Heindl outspokenly works against predominant habits of seeing, shifting genre limitations, breaking free of the conventional understanding of functional jewellery. Her well thought out, thematic series of works carry names that already depict the searching and creative work behind them, such as Blazing Pigment, Flowers of the Night, Garden of Lust or Gravity. The realisation of her work is always preceded by intensive research; delving into a topic takes several years. The artist thus elegantly invalidates the thesis of a hierarchy of the arts, which merely concedes the applied or decorative arts the ability to repeat or reproduce, contrary to the “high arts” with their intellectual, genius and creative achievements.

Anna Heindl’s jewellery artworks are contrasted with the work of three artists who are also conducting intensive research on a fundamental level on the universe. Her series Kosmos meets Geopsyche by Elisabeth von Samsonow, Gravity by Nives Widauer and Plejaden (Pleiades) by Frenzi Rigling. Jewellery art, painting and graphic design enter into an intensive dialogue regarding both content and aesthetics, thus surmounting postulated borders between the arts and media.

Dr. Sabine Fellner
Curator, Vienna

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