Verena Dengler: Die Galeristin und der schöne Antikapitalist auf der Gothic G’stettn was published in connection with the artist’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2020.

The exhibition transformed the gallery into a staged landscape: a pond surrounded by an overgrown urban wasteland, or “Gstettn,” into which Dengler inserted works, objects, references, and narrative fragments. The early history of the Secession, including its flower-decorated sales exhibitions, served as one point of departure, as did the artist’s engagement with Romanticism and its afterlives.

Dengler’s practice moves between installation, sculpture, drawing, textile, language, and institutional critique. She frequently works with historical references, social codes, gender roles, class markers, decorative forms, and popular culture, combining them in a deliberately layered and often ironic visual language. In this context, the Secession project can be read as a landscape of contradictions: between nature and staging, bourgeois display and urban wasteland, romantic longing and contemporary precarity.

The catalogue reflects Dengler’s method of combining art-historical material, personal and political references, humour, ornament, and institutional self-reflection. Rather than presenting a linear exhibition document, it opens a field of associations around display, authorship, class, femininity, anti-capitalist desire, and the symbolic economy of the art institution.

Bibliographic details: Verena Dengler. Die Galeristin und der schöne Antikapitalist auf der Gothic G’stettn (Corona Srezessionsession Dengvid-20 :) ). Published by Secession, Vienna, 2020. Published in connection with the exhibition at the Vienna Secession, 3 June – 6 September 2020.