Agnes Scherer Three Wicked Games

Agnes Scherer's exhibition Three Wicked Games takes as its starting point an inventory of contemporary obsessions and translates them, in reverse or sideways, into two so-called tapestry designs by Francisco Goya: Blind Man's Bluff (1789) and The Jumping Jack (1791). Both depict folk games.

The artist recognizes in these games a structure that seems uncannily contemporary. In both compositions, a powerless figure is at the center. Around this figure, society arranges itself as if in a choreography. Someone is blindfolded, someone is thrown, someone laughs, and someone waits their turn. To these games, Scherer adds a third, imagined scene that also suggests a game.

Scherer transposes these images into a ghostly puppet theater. While quoting the compositions almost verbatim, she deprives the figures of their physicality. The intact figure no longer feels right, Scherer explains. It belongs to a fantasy of coherence that can no longer be fulfilled by the present. What interests the artist more than the body is life under the conditions of late capitalism, characterized by a cycle of profit-oriented transactions and ongoing dependencies.

Curated by Mirela Baciak.

Commissioned and produced by the Salzburger Kunstverein.

Agnes Scherer (born 1985, Lohr am Main, Germany) addresses power relations and their psychosocial foundations, female experience, states of mind in capitalist realities, and the uncanny reappearance of historical systems of order in the present. By combining sculpture, painting, and collage, she creates scenic installations and performative object theater in which the marionette often plays a central role. As a real figure or even just as a conceptual figure of entanglement, it can make visible complex connections that otherwise elude immediate perception. Scherer's often systemic arrangements demand an active, interpretive synthesis of all elements, through which the actual image emerges as a mental construct. Her formats are based on art historical and anthropological studies, as well as a particular interest in popular art forms of early modernism, especially in the realm of performance art. The artist lives and works between Franconia, Germany, and Salzburg, Austria, where she is a professor of painting at the Mozarteum University Salzburg.