A fusion of floral motifs and femininity – this is the effect of the new photo exhibition by Birgit Unterweger Code Red.

Poets of earlier eras used flowers and blossoms as metaphors for feminine grace. In Art Nouveau, artists even fused female figures directly with flowers.

For Birgit Unterweger, it is also the “delicate melting”, as she puts it, that connects the motifs. Both here and there, there is an erotically charged red, a symbol of fire, fieriness and passion that has been handed down over the centuries.

The blurred style reveals that Birgit Unterweger does not actually want to take photographs with her camera, but rather to paint. The flowers look as if they have been painted with a brush, the purple sweep of the leaves could very well have been done with a broad bristle. The blurring brings the beauty of the colors into focus, the sensual power of the forms. This blurred photograph opens our eyes and allows us to literally feel the sensuality and beauty inherent in things.

The overly sharp contours of the photograph assert an autonomy of the motifs that they de facto do not possess. Birgit Unterweger’s blurred photography can thus also be read as an anarchistic protest and as a refusal to reproduce false unambiguities and to perpetuate the idea that the world can be pressed into clearly defined structures.

Wherever Birgit Unterweger uses painterly means to simulate movement, it is also transferred directly to the viewer. The process is sophisticated. After all, the flower – despite the constant transfer of energy – stands more or less motionless in its vase. And yet these photographs are inscribed with dynamism, fleetingness and eternal transformation and change.