Iris Sageder's sculptures reliefs and impasto oil paintings create a magical universe that
places the human trials and tribulations associated with evolutionary processes at the center
of her artistic practice. The artist refers to ritual practices and uses mystical content to
express the hybridization of humans and animals in representations of a pre-human as a primate
human potential as an embryo and the non-human as alien. Her subjects emerge from the tension
between the loss of innocence and the cognitive capacity of human consciousness. We proudly
claim to have been the only ones to have eaten from the tree of knowledge. It is this that
fundamentally differentiates us from animals. One part of this concept is the belief that
humans have a very clear lead in an evolutionary race. In my work I try to explore the nature
of this lead and to question it again and again says Iris Sageder. Sageder's creative process
from the idea via the image to the realization of the object in three-dimensional space
develops on the basis of a gradual dimensional leap that reflects the slogan: Form-finding
follows form-leaving. Upon being viewed the artist's idiosyncratic figures unfold enormous
suggestive power and timelessness. The formal language with its partly cubist lines and
elements which appears to be borrowed from the aesthetics of comics penetrates the
abstraction of a figurative symbolism with intense physical presence and great immediacy.
