Amina Broggi | MyArtSpace

It is a familiar phenomenon that suicidal individuals tend to envision what they might look like at the moment in which they are found. This one of the central issues, which Amina Broggi pursues in her series abgewandt (‘averted’) – a group of works that is fascinating and shocking in equal measure because its exuberant colorfulness covers up the horror of the subject matter, because enticements are presented in a sleek aesthetic without disregarding the potential dangers in the semantics of the images, and because it reenergizes an old theme of the Vienna Secession in a highly contemporary manner: the eroticism of death in today’s media age which in our time depends on manipulated images in both the fields of advertising and news coverage. The series abgewandt exclusively features close-ups of young nude women, which are primarily beautiful and are depicted from the back and from an extreme high or low angle.
Amina Broggi has not only dealt with unusual facets of life and death in the 21rst century in this particular series. In her series of Pigeons, she elevates the unpleasant reality of big city pigeon plagues to intriguing scenarios in the timeless, meditative atmosphere of radiant still lifes. Whether the wing feathers of a pigeon are being spread apart with rubber gloves, a maimed pigeon is lying in the gutter or has only just jauntily landed on a leather handbag standing on the ground: as in animal still lifes, the symbolism of abundance is always resonant in a both negative and positive sense, appearing like a paradigm of life itself.
The experience of observing a stranded shipment of dolls in the harbor of Accra in Ghana gave the artist the impulse for her latest series Glaskinder (ʻGlass Childrenʼ). Here, the images are no longer inhabited by living entities but rather, as quasi substitutes, by dolls. Broggi gathered up the fragments on the beach and photographed them, using these images in the production of pictorial compositions in her studio. Back in Berlin, where the artist resides, she also acquired brand-new dolls, employing them as models for her paintings. For Amina Broggi, the ‘Glass Children’ stand for the painful development from childhood to adulthood, to the state of being a ʻmental beingʼ, as she states – a development that in the paintings is made palpable to the viewers as a journey traversing sites of crime.
The artist Amina Broggi, who was born in 1980 in Altstätten in Switzerland and grew up in the Principality of Liechtenstein, studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She received her diploma in 2007, and works and resides in Vienna and Berlin.
Amina Broggi has participated in numerous exhibitions, among others, in Real - Junges Österreich, Kunsthalle Krems (2005), emerging artists: hotspots, Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg (2005), exitus. tod alltäglich, Künstlerhaus Wien (2007). (GALERIE HENGEVOSS-DÜRKOP, Hamburg)