Four Friends, Maybe Five
Sigtryggur Berg | Franz Graf | Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir | Claudia Schumann
Opening Friday, September 18 at 6pm
Runs through September 27
Four Friends, Maybe Five brings together four artists in an exhibition at HilbertRaum featuring works that combine drawing, photography, painting, installation, and performance across the gallery’s two main spaces.
The exhibition reflects the artists’ connections through Iceland, Austria, and Germany, and will include works and contributions that may evolve and intermingle during the course of the installation. In the front space, Claudia Schuman and Franz Graf present an arrangement of new and recent photographic works and drawings. In the back space, Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir and Sigtryggur Berg will develop a shared installation with drawings and paintings.
A performance program will take place with performances by Sigtryggur Berg, Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir, and a special guest; composer, vocalist and performer Doreen Kuzke on the second Saturday of the exhibition, September 26.
Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson is a visual, sound and performance artist born in Akureyri, Iceland in 1977, currently living and working in Hannover, Germany. He studied Sonology in The Hague and visual arts in Hannover. Sigmarsson exhibits his paintings and drawings internationally but is probably best known for his energetic performances at a wide array of venues. His approach is that of the trembling artist, struggling to make sense and direction out of a creative impulse. Regardless of the medium, there is a continuous search for order and chaos throughout his body of work. With his series of drawings, Sigmarsson distorts normal, daily life by abstracting common objects.
Franz Graf (b. 1954) traces paths and creates marks. His primary concept is based on the linking and overlapping of diverse media and materials -- such as abstract, ornamental, and figurative drawings, found literary texts, individual letters and words, photographic depictions of reality, and found objects -- resulting in a new, open structure within his work, the thematic nature of which is equally wide-ranging. Adopting a neo-conceptual stance, Graf devises chains of abstraction and association; he employs elements from the past to supplement memory and evaluate the present, while simultaneously appealing to subconscious processes. Franz Graf has held solo exhibitions at venues including the Frankfurter Kunstverein (1979), the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz (1990), the Vienna Secession (1995), the Bonner Kunstverein (1995), the Rupertinum in Salzburg (2001), and the MAK in Vienna (2009). In 2007, he created a floor design at the entrance to Salzburg’s Mozarteum at Mirabellplatz as part of an "art-in-architecture" project.
Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir is a visual artist born in Reykjavik 1972. Hauksdóttir works with drawing as an intermedium between forms, ideas or events and musical score or sound textures, often accumulating in choir compositions and audio installations. She uses colour and abstract imagery to measure ideas and travel between mediums. Her work has been displayed and performed internationally throughout her career. Among notable institutions that have displayed her works and performances are the National Gallery of Iceland (2026), Hafnarborg Museum (2025), the Galeria Municipal do Porto (2023), the Reykjavik Art Museum (2020), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2015), Uppsala Art Museum (2019) and the 21 Haus at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna (2014). She took part in the Silver Lining exhibition in the Swiss Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015).
“Schumann’s images relate a complex overlapping of destruction, hindrance and confirmation.”*
Claudia Schumann was born in Vienna 1963. Her conceptual and poetic work spans various media and space related installation approaches. She regularly exhibits her work both in commercial galleries and independent art spaces including Gallery Juenger, Gallery Hummel, Judith Ortner / Ortner2, Westlicht and Ostlicht Vienna. Her notable exhibitions have been at Museum Belvedere and the 21er Haus in Vienna, Lentos Museum in Linz, AIC Berlin, in the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York, Berlin and Belgrade. She curates collaborative art projects with an interdisciplinary approach. Schumann is the recipient of the Austrian state scholarship for photography 2024.
*Brigitta Keintzel, from "The Materiality of Images and the Ontology of the Gaze"