01

in the pairs of the opposites promise/expectation and fulfillment/disappointment, human experience is reflected in art. we assume that a stable personality is formed in the practiced handling and, ideally, with a balanced mixture of the pleasing and saddening elements of oneself. a differentiated perception based on this encounters a work of art with a certain openness. this does not refer to the well-spooned knowledge of a content that has been hastily piled up over the last four decades. it is precisely the artificial condensation of catchy zeitgeist that blocks an unclouded view of what art, at its best, can only ever be … the answer to a question.

02

intuition, curiosity and a personally added wealth of experience generate a dialog with art which, depending on the different starting points, can ideally lead to contradictory insights, which in turn is only conducive to a lively dialog. the naked breasts of a woman dipped in a doughy mass, provided with the description ‚hardcheesecake‘ allows a perfect entry into the finely spun world of the artist, as she plays very impressively with the pairs of human experiential approaches mentioned at the beginning. ’serious misery‘, an installation with a well-arranged living room interior at the foot of a minimalist wall piece, complements this approach to cunningly questioned social standards. precisely because breasts pressed into cheesecake are not a standard, but the bleakness of decorative ineptitude taken from a furniture store catalog is, the tension between a moist, perverse adolescent dream on the one hand and the all too dried-up clumsiness of advanced adults on the other creates an arc under which we can examine wahl’s intentions at our leisure.

03

the most common promise of a joke is the expected hilarity; precisely when it dissolves into its punchline. the reasons why liberating laughter cannot be placed high enough sociologically are obvious at a time when certain fragmented groups are splitting into ever smaller and hostile cells. although it should also be borne in mind that this redemption is usually based on the harm done to an individual, laughing together is also always the possibility of approaching one another. if art is the answer to a question posed, the depiction of a woman’s breast covered in dough is only funny at first. precisely because a certain uncertainty has crept in over the last few years about when, and above all why, we are now allowed to laugh, breast and sofa are palatable and poisonous in equal measure.

04

‚the origin of the world‘, a scandalous painting by gustave courbet, which wahl negotiates as a reproduction in a work, calmly adds the concept of shame to this tense discourse. a woman lying with her legs apart, her hairy, laid out sex in the center, the picture detail focusing on her exposed, naked reproductive organ, suddenly becomes blurred when someone approaches the picture too closely. motion detectors create the effect of image deprivation; the person who feels caught, however, cannot classify the actual origin of this refusal of the work. only an absolute rigidity of movement unlocks the object again in the truest sense. thus the shame of the individual intruding into a staged sphere of intimacy becomes the cause of not being able to look further at this depicted shame. here again, only formulated more forcefully, the question of the threshold value between sexual curiosity and voyeurism arises.

05

while on the one hand the artist instrumentalizes wit as a means of redemption and audience reassurance, the guilt trap snaps mercilessly shut when looking at the courbet. the animal has caught itself. there is no more impressive way to play the freudian piano. the artist remains silent and smiles mildly. thus, she only adds more rouge to the already glowing cheeks of her viewers. precisely because no moment wants to last forever, wahl rows straight back with the work ‚pussyhat‘ and simply places the female sex as knitwear on the head of the shame-ridden crowd. the blurriness of the question once again conceals wahl’s stumbling trick. ‚is that now a…?‘ on the head or is the person wearing it ‚a…?‘, or does the whole thing refer to someone else? promise, expectation, fulfillment and disappointment hug and comfort each other in this work with a lightness that promises to dissolve boundaries, but only to a limited extent. every idea drowns in the excessive repetition of itself. so we interpret it as an artistic intuition that yvonne wahl only allows the play with the bewildered audience to flow into her overall work at certain intervals.

martin eugen raabenstein, 2023

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