People / Irene Andessner

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Irene Andessner © CLS-Privatportrait-Siebinger

Irene Andessner

Irene Andessner, who was born in Salzburg, studied at the Academies of Art in Venice (Emilio Vedova) and Vienna (Arnulf Rainer and Max Weiler), received a bursary in the early 1980s, which enabled her to work in Rome, and opened a a studio in Cologne in 1989. She now lives and works in Vienna and Venice. The focus in her work as an artist is on the self-portrait. Since the mid-1990s Andessner has added photography and video to the traditional painting techniques as these enable her to include additional levels of expressivity, namely self-staging and role play. Irene Andessner’s pictures are used by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk as cases in point  to illustrate his concept of “détrait”. For him the “détrait” marks the position diametrically opposed to the “portrait” in that the former represents the dissolution of the visual representation of a personality and unmasks its arbitrariness.