ASTRID WAGNER

ASTRID WAGNER

Headerbond

Oil colour and oil pastel on paper,
acrylic paint on wood, anti-reflective UV glass
each 51 × 71 × 3,5 cm

During my residency in London, I often went to a yoga centre to practise relaxation. During one session, I lay on my back. A cork yoga block shaped like a brick rested halfway on my forehead. The other half rested on a tower-like structure at the height of my head. This allowed the block to lie flat and stable on my forehead. After a while, under the gentle pressure of the brick, I felt my forehead begin to pulse – softly at first, then spreading further and further until it eventually merged with my heartbeat.
The clay bricks used in London‘s buildings are known as London Stock. The clay is yellow, although this is no longer visible due to environmental factors. For curved architectural elements, bricks are laid in what is known as a header bond. This provides greater flexibility for curved forms when building structures such as columns or curved walls. The term ‚header bond‘ derives from the fact that, when a brick is laid, its end faces outwards whilst its long side is hidden within the structure.
On my first day at school, the principal said that knowledge is like a wall built brick by brick. That was in the GDR. Just a year later, the Berlin Wall came down.
On the physical side, the idea of walking through walls has intrigued people for ages. While impossible at the moment, the idea still sparks curiosity about the nature of reality. Quantum mechanics and its phenomena, like quantum tunneling, challenge a conventional understanding of solid objects. While atoms seem solid, they are mostly empty space, held together by forces. On a quantum level, there is a small chance that particles can pass through barriers – though the odds of an entire human body doing this are vanishingly small. Quantum computing or advanced materials science could one day reveal ways to manipulate matter in ways currently unimaginable. Technologies like cloaking devices or metamaterials, which manipulate light and other waves, show that the understanding of what is „solid“ or „visible“ is already evolving. Boundaries – both external and internal – often linger long after the physical walls fall. So while my body cannot physically walk through walls now, the future might bring things that once seemed like pure fantasy.

London/Vienna 2024

Headerbond 1, Window: vertical black rectangle like a window, slightly right of center, on a blue gradient with a brick grid, red frame. All works in this series are landscape format, and all grid lines are of equal weight.
Headerbond 2, Eclipse: thin cold yellow crescent and dark disc forming an eclipse, slightly right of center, beneath the brick grid; dark ground, charcoal frame
Headerbond 3, Traffic: white brick grid over a speckled black-and-white ground, six glowing neon circles like traffic lights, green, red, orange-yellow at left, reversed at right; natural white frame
Headerbond 4, Blue: pencil-drawn brick grid with cells in shades of blue from light blue to violet, one whitish, one yellowish and one black cell cropped by the frame; lacquered frame in saturated blue
Headerbond 5, Egg: green grid, behind it a soft-focus green landscape with a pale path. At left, a deep violet rectangle, in its lower left corner a beige egg. Frame in beige, the tone of the egg.
Headerbond 6, Red: white grid, its bricks in red, orange, beige and yellow; one almost neon pink; at the heart position, a black one; a blue one cropped by the frame. Red frame.
Headerbond 7, Orange: large, vivid orange square at the center, over a grid drawn in multicolored pencil; behind it, shimmering greenish ink fields and an amorphous blank patch of bare paper in the upper left corner. Frame in green wood stain, the grain visible.
Headerbond 8, Butterfly: unfinished butterfly painting layered over a brick grid, which opens to fields of light green, dark green, black and white. Background shading from light at the top to dark at the bottom; the grid in counter-direction, dark at the top to light at the bottom. Frame painted in strong mid-green.
Headerbond 9, Ink: deep blue ink ground, blotchy and uneven; over it, a grid drawn in white pencil. Blue frame.
Headerbond 10, Buckle: close-up of a silver belt buckle filling almost the whole picture; the belt, black-brown, runs out of the picture at left and right, cut off by the frame. Dark grey grid; behind it, glowing red where it shows. Silver-grey frame.