Place: Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna
Date: -
Photos by: Manuel Carreon Lopez
Artists: Isabella Fürnkäs
Works: Interiorities, The Desiring Machines
In the exhibition Water Mirage, Isabella Séville Fürnkäs presents works from the series Interiorities alongside the installation The Desiring Machines.
The Desiring Machines (2025) consists of individual mouth-blown ruby-red glass drops filled with ethanol and inscribed with handwritten engraved words. Fürnkäs explores the physical interstices between human and machine, masculinity and femininity. Drawing on Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze, she incorporates quotations that address the fluid processes of the body, its circulation, and its needs. The mind of the viewer and listener itself becomes a vessel in which a fluid web of its own thoughts emerges. The floating, tranquil glass droplets appear to transform into fundamental human sensations, questioning their material nature. One thing is certain: we are not our feelings — they are merely a fragment of the infinite abundance of our consciousness.
Interiorities (2024–2025) is a series of mixed-media works on paper, executed in oil pastels. Fürnkäs’ drawing series Interiorities plays on a sense of suspension — the suspension of pigment in oil, the suspension of reality in favour of raw emotion. One after the other, formless figures tending towards abstraction cover sheets of brown paper. Hands, faces; gaping mouths, open wounds. Through pure gesturality and colour, the drawings somehow articulate a language of their own. Each drawing adds phonemes, words, punctuation — in this way constructing a broader cosmos of meaning. It’s a primal language, a mother tongue, the kind that isn’t learned on an intellectual level, but rather an emotional and intuitive one. The kind whose rules and grammar you can’t explain — you just, inexplicably, know.