Isabell Rauchenbichler. And the Flowers Are Melting

Concurrently to the Annual Exhibition 2025/26, we present the work of Isabell Rauchenbichler, the winner of the 2024 Emerging Artist Award of Land Salzburg and Salzburger Kunstverein.

Is the essence of things deeply hidden beneath the surface or is the surface where most of the action is? Surfaces, after all, are what emerge when a medium meets a substance. They divide an interior, micro-world of the mind from the exterior, macro-world of the environment. Yet they also act as transformative thresholds between the visible and the invisible, and manifest distinct qualities in the meeting of bodies and materials.

Isabell Rauchenbichler’s exhibition And the Flowers Are Melting operates within this threshold zone. It contextualizes surfaces as places of friction, memory, and transformation. The architecture of the Salzburger Kunstverein subtly participates in this logic. Two small slits in the existing infrastructure opens onto hidden cavities. From within, a quiet sound seeps out, barely audible, yet insistent. This sonic leak turns the building itself into a surface that listens and speaks. It heightens attention to what remains concealed and what hums beneath perception.

Rauchenbichler’s inspiration comes from the beehive as a place where collective labour, fragility, and architecture interlace. Wax, with its ability to both hold and yield, becomes her primary sculptural material. The objects she creates are thin-skinned. Images accumulate upon their surfaces, partly opaque and partly translucent painterly gestures.

Alongside these waxen structures appear working suits, evoking a long tradition in which garments stand in for the labouring body. One might think here of Tatlin’s famous suit—an emblem of the working class that crystallized the political and material stakes of artistic production. In Rauchenbichler’s case, the suits operate as both residue and medium: they hold the spectre of labour within their folds while simultaneously becoming canvases themselves. Painted directly onto their surfaces, images and markings seep into the textile, transforming these garments into carriers of narrative. The suits thus function as double skins, protective layers that once mediated between body and work, now reactivated as sites where stories are absorbed, overwritten, and made visible.

Taken together, Rauchenbichler’s exhibition brings attention to surfaces as sites where memories unfold. The works do not necessarily ask us to look beyond these surfaces, but to observe how they gather traces. From here, the exhibition opens onto what Gaston Bachelard described as The Poetics of Space, where even the smallest corner or object can become “an invitation to inhabit daydreaming.” Rauchenbichler’s surfaces offer precisely such invitations—subtle and open-ended.

Isabell Rauchenbichler (*1976, Salzburg) studied Fine Arts at the University of Art and Design Linz, specializing in Painting and Graphics under Ursula Hübner. Her work combines painting and objects into delicate, often site-specific installations that invite or contemplate viewer participation. Her practice explores the properties of different materials through an experimental and associative approach to painting, intertwining themes such as time, memory, identity, and transformation. She has exhibited her work in various venues, including Traklhaus (Salzburg), Stadtgalerien Salzburg, Salzburger Kunstverein, Galerie WHA (Linz), Galerie Sophia Vonier (Salzburg), and Fünfzigzwanzig (Salzburg). Her international residencies include stays in Paliano and Budapest. Her work has been acquired by the City and Province of Salzburg. Notable recognitions include the 2023 Fine Arts Annual Scholarship (Province of Salzburg), a working grant from Galerie Ropac in collaboration with Salzburger Kunstverein, the KEP Working Scholarship (Province of Salzburg), and a scholarship for the Künstler:innen Symposium Ortung. Since 2016, she has served as a board member of Fünfzigzwanzig (IG Bildende Künstler:innen), an association and exhibition space dedicated to promoting contemporary visual art and its discourses. She lives and works in Salzburg.

Image: Isabell Rauchenbichler, Cluster, 2025, bubble wrap, beeswax, LED lamp, approx. 30 x 21 x 21 cm, courtesy of the artist.