Works by Nikola Irmer in the Museum of Natural History
This season, Admont Abbey's Museum of Natural History is housing works of contemporary art by Nikola Irmer in dialogue with the historical preparations there and the current special exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The artist, who was born in Germany, works internationally and has recently moved to Graz, was invited in the context of the "Styrian Roots" exhibition and the "ADMONT GUESTS" track which was established in 2011. A selection representative of drawings and paintings offers insights into the background of Nikola Irmer's series of works, which deal with nature and natural history collections in a variety of ways. The exhibited works are on loan from the artist. They show excerpts from zoological collections and their depots. They were not created in Admont, but arose from cooperation with other museums, including Oxford, Florence, Vienna, Berlin and Leiden.
In the course of her project research on natural history museums and their relationship to art, Nikola Irmer also came across Admont Museum and the Father Gabriel Strobl collections. “One of my projects is based on current issues such as the extinction of species and the generally endangered equilibrium between contemporary culture and nature,” says Nikola Irmer. She is particularly interested in the cultural history of collecting items and space in museums as a place for remembering and poeticising.
The ongoing project, presented in Admont this season on the basis of the ‘pars pro Toto’ principle, has been exhibited in various formats and institutions. It was part of the ‘Wordly House’ presented by Tue Greenfort at the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition. In 2015, Friedenstein Palace in Gotha was the venue for an exhibition related to the local collections. In addition to numerous exhibitions, solo exhibitions were presented at the Kunsthalle Memmingen (2015) as well as in cooperation with the Kunstverein Kreuzlingen and the University of Constance (2017).
In any case, a future MADE-FOR-ADMONT project relating to the Abbey's own collections is under discussion.
Nikola Irmer was born in 1970 in Starnberg/Germany and has lived and worked in Graz/Styria since 2020. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Glasgow School of Art and at Hunter College New York. In 2012, she took part in the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition in Kassel. www.nikolairmer.com www.nikolairmer.com
