Z33, House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture
Hasselt
Belgien
Raphaela Vogel: De mens is geen vogel
German artist Raphaela Vogel ​(b. 1988, Nuremberg) arrives at Z33 with her first major solo exhibition in Belgium. With De mens is geen vogel (Man is no bird), Vogel brings together an immersive world of image, sound and movement, an exhibition you feel with your whole body.
The man who must not fly
The title of the exhibition is also a playful nod to the artist's own surname. At the same time, it refers to a poem written by the German writer Bertolt Brecht around a hundred years ago, about a tailor from Ulm who, in the year 1592, was convinced he could fly. He jumps from the church roof, hoping to fly away, and falls to his death. Afterwards, the bishop speaks the famous words: “Man is not a bird. Man will never fly.” For Raphaela Vogel, this is an image of how power determines what we consider possible or permitted. Her work consistently explores this boundary.
Who is Raphaela Vogel?
Vogel is a distinctly multidisciplinary artist. She paints, sculpts, creates installations and videos, performs, composes, and sings her own soundtracks. She belongs to a generation of artists who grew up with digital technology as an artistic tool: she films herself with drones, 360°-cameras and 3D scanners, and consistently appears as the protagonist in her own videos. She never works with a film crew and does all the filming, directing and editing herself. This do-it-yourself mentality partly stems from her youth in the punk scene, where she sang in a band. That anarchic, raw energy still runs through her work, in monumental sculptures often made from found objects and combined with sound, light and movement.
In recent years, Vogel has exhibited at, among others, Museo Tamayo (Mexico City), Petzel Gallery (New York), Museum De Pont (Tilburg), Kunsthaus Bregenz and Haus der Kunst (Munich), and in 2022 took part in The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Faster than your mind
One and the same principle runs through her entire oeuvre: contrast. Vogel does not work with narrative structures that have a beginning and an end. Instead, she lets opposites collide, such as monumentality and fragility, the technical and the physical, humour and terror, banality and myth. It is precisely within that tension between extremes that her so-called “little shocks” arise: brief moments in which your body reacts faster than your mind, much like at a fairground or in the circus. Walking through the galleries of Z33, visitors are immersed in an environment full of sound, light and movement, such as sirens, whispers, the drone of aeroplanes and glistening tears. The result is a world that is not detached from reality, but magnifies, distorts and puts pressure on it.
A new work, made specially for Z33
For this exhibition, Vogel creates a brand-new, monumental installation: an anatomical model of an eye, almost two metres wide, from which dozens of “tears” hang, found art deco lamps she has fitted with light and speakers. Visitors walk straight through the tears to enter the exhibition, and can look up into the iris from the very centre. It is both the literal and figurative starting point of the exhibition: a gateway into Raphaela Vogel's world.
Alongside this new work, Z33 presents around ten major installations in which video, sculpture, painting and sound come together, each with its own story, from a hidden wartime history to dancing dinosaurs.
About Raphaela Vogel
Raphaela Vogel (b. 1988, Nuremberg, DE) lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. From 2014 to 2016, she was an artist-in-residence at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.
Vogel has exhibited widely and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2025); Petzel Gallery, New York (2024); Museum De Pont, Tilburg (2023); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2019); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019), and Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2018). In 2022, Vogel took part in the exhibition The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Vogel's work can be found in public collections such as De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art, Tilburg; Kunsthaus ZĂĽrich, Zurich; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Leopold-Hoesch Museum, DĂĽren; Neues Museum NĂĽrnberg; Sammlung Philara, DĂĽsseldorf; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Museum fĂĽr Moderne Kunst (MSN), Warsaw.
About Z33
Z33 is the House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture in the historic centre of Hasselt. Design, contemporary art and architecture come together in a wide-ranging programme of exhibitions, lectures, research and talent development. The new exhibition building, designed by Italian architect Francesca Torzo, opened its doors on May 21, 2020 and received the Italian Architecture Prize.
