*1941 in Wien, AT, lives and works in Inner-schwand am Mondsee, AT

The intention in all of her series is to make visible the constitutive presence of light. Light as immaterial material is vividly illustrated in Inge Dick’s work. She portrays what is not portrayable on its own. Normally light serves the purpose of making an object visible to the viewer; with Inge Dick light is the sole subject. In many years of almost scientific study she has succeeded in capturing the substance of light and visualizing light. In doing so she makes use of a particular feature of our visual sense. Our eye has been trained to adjust to specific light conditions as the pupil opens and closes. As a result we perceive only to a limited degree a change in the color temperature of light. To our eye a white surface remains simply white, whether it is in the midday sun or in evening light. This is not the case for Inge Dick.

In her current projects “autumn light white” (2012), “summer light white” (2013), “spring light white” (2014) and “winter light white” (2014/15) the artist filmed a white surface for three days each to document the change in light. The white panel was placed in a neutral location without direct sunlight. The camera, the setting of which remained the same, recorded the change in the intensity and color of the light on the white surface over three days. The result are films of many hours “that depict all colors”.

The [selected] stills transform the film back into photography. These works show [color squares] that Inge Dick has extracted from the extensive film material. The time codes make it possible to determine the exact time of exposure. […] Peter Volkwein once wrote that in no other pictorial medium is the element of time as inherent as it is in photography. As with the photos, the films are portrayals of time and of light. In compressed form the poetic film stills of Inge Dick reveal the colorful light spectrum of several days: evening red is juxtaposed to the black of night, morning blue turns to midday gold, and rain gray is transformed via the yellow of dusk once again into the dark of night.

Gerda Ridler, translated by Anne Heritage

This exhibition also includes a medium-format Polaroid that Inge Dick took on 16 August 2006 with one of three Polaroid cameras of this format worldwide.

She had been using the characteristic 7.9 x 7.9 cm Polaroid to create instant images of moments of light since 1982, translating her earlier white paintings into the Polaroid medium by photographing her studio walls illuminated by the sun.

She was later to be the last artist to use the only large-format camera in Boston, USA.

Juliane Rogge

Inge Dick bei www.renate-bender.de