High Weirdness

When we consider something to be weird it’s usually a thing we can’t explain, a thing we don’t understand. Weird is unsettling, can be horrifying, but also fascinating. ‘High Weirdness’ deals with the feeling of ‘weird’interpreted by three different artistic perspectives.

Antonia Freisburger’s paintings remind me of the tempting smoothness and pastel colours of impossibly chewy candies. At the same time I’m terrified of being submerged in their sticky surface which seems to exist in a dimension incomprehensible to human minus. Antonia’s paintings make you loose the sense of time and scale, they conjure feelings like those of cosmic horror- a slip of the mind and suddenly you’re aware and terrified of things that are way beyond your understanding and control. Standing in front of her vast canvases you might get the feeling of being sucked into a strange universe of pulsating colours, of glowing and expanding shapes that are difficult to define with words, as though they don’t belong to earthly vocabulary. They have a sort of viscosity that makes makes you feel like you stuck in there and similarly to escaping the quicksand–the more you try to move the more you become trapped. Antonia’s work makes me think of the idea of ‘Hyperobjects’- a term coined by Timothy Morton to describe entities such as environmental threats (for example radioactivity, global warming, styrofoam but also capitalism) with the impact so massively expanded in time or space, that it can’t be fully grasped by an individual. […]

Gosiah Lehmann

Solaris Space, Berlin, 2022