The found mattress (text by Laura Steiner)

The spent time of lockdown in the seclusion of one's own four walls bundled Anne Glassner's artistic explorations in the works shown here onto the web of meaning that surrounds the object of the mattress. In a consistent continuation of the topos "SLEEP", which Glassner has been exploring for years, both performatively and photographically, in her site-specific research, this show is seamlessly integrated into the body-language-based, form-developing stringency that the artist continues with great determination.

The discursive, as well as conceptual pivots of the exhibition at Aa Collections arise in the tension between the opposites of flexibility and rigidity of form, concealment and visibility, distance and proximity. Glassner detaches the utilitarian object mattress from the familiar linguistic and phenomenal field and utilizes it performatively to make concentrated morphological-aesthetic statements of the relationship between body and object, between intimacy and solitude, and between tension and relaxation. With the visualization, extrapolation and exaggeration of the body's relationship of proximity to the "thrown down floor cushion" - this is the literal translation of the term mattress, which comes from Arabic - Glassner approaches the following themes:

The deliberately set boundaries between subject and object on the one hand, as well as the temporary lack of differentiation between the two on the other. 

In the context of the exhibition space, the works refer to fundamental aspects of "being with oneself", the degree of self-attention, but also the states in which body and object - MATTRESS - become one, due to the absence of identifying actions during sleep. The mattress, in its socio-economic narrowing often dismissed as a nocturnal therapy tool to guarantee performance in the waking state, is upgraded in Glassner's artistic architectonics of ideas to a platform from which she once again allows us to look deeper into her multifaceted oeuvre.  

photos: Julius Werner Chromecek/ Christian Prinz

https://www.les-nouveaux-riches.com/ausstellung-die-gefundene-matratze/