Ilona Kálnoky was born 1968 in Styria, Austria; she lives and works in Berlin.
Ilona Kàlnoky has long been developing works that she describes with the term `substantial sculptures´. The artist adds a further component, the emotional level, to the theme of spatial perception, which is important to her.
Her interest is in dealing with material, with which the artist associates a "body feeling". She forms balls of plaster, throws them against the wall, ties them up or pours wax into forms. Each action or mixture of different materials is intended to provoke different sensations in the viewer.
The unsettling, confirming or even calming effect of her works is intended to stimulate the viewer's senses to sensitize his sensors and protect them from dulling. The process is to be traced in a questioning way; thus, thanks to the natural material, one approaches the self-conception of one's own body, which leads to a self-conscious physicality - to "being in the body". Ernst Bloch's sentence already characterized this process: "I am, but I do not have myself. That's why we become first.
