Iris Sageder’s sculptures, reliefs, and impasto oil paintings create a magical universe that places the human trials and tribulations associated with evolutionary processes at the center of her artistic practice. The artist refers to ritual practices and uses mystical content to express the hybridization of humans and animals in representations of a pre-human as a primate, human potential as an embryo, and the non-human as alien. Her subjects emerge from the tension between the loss of innocence and the cognitive capacity of human consciousness. “We proudly claim to have been the only ones to have eaten from the tree of knowledge. It is this that fundamentally differentiates us from animals. One part of this concept is the belief that humans have a very clear lead in an evolutionary race. In my work, I try to explore the nature of this lead and to question it, again and again,” says Iris Sageder.

Sageder’s creative process, from the idea, via the image, to the realization of the object in three-dimensional space, develops on the basis of a gradual dimensional leap that reflects the slogan: Form-finding follows form-leaving. Upon being viewed, the artist’s idiosyncratic figures unfold enormous suggestive power and timelessness. The formal language with its partly cubist lines and elements, which appears to be borrowed from the aesthetics of comics, penetrates the abstraction of a figurative symbolism with intense physical presence and great immediacy.