Agnes Scherer

In her work, Agnes Scherer combines painted sculpture, painting, drawing, and performance to create narrative installations and elaborate ​“operettas.” Through figurative representations, she reveals hierarchies, representational logics, and power dynamics. In doing so, the artist layers historical references and deliberately employs anachronisms as strategies of alienation.

The work An unnamed file contains an incorrect path is part of the series The Notebook Simulations, created in 2021. In these ​“laptop simulations,” Scherer creates pictorial spaces on painted computer screens in which enigmatic scenarios are interwoven with elements of ​“contemporary folklore.” To do so, she draws on historical and mythical sources and combines them with the visual language of digital interfaces. This gives rise to ambiguous, enigmatic, and cosmic-seeming visual structures.

The sculpture, reminiscent of frescoes, consists of two canvases of equal size, one of which lies on the floor and displays an oversized laptop keyboard. This does not imitate a real model but forms a fictional combination of different symbols, including Greek letters, as a kind of foundation for a possible new system of signs.

The painted Windows desktop, rendered in a Giotto-esque blue background, appears enigmatic due to the combination of figures and messages in open windows. A herd of seemingly identical riders on galloping horses — who, upon closer inspection, differ slightly from one another — evokes historical depictions of horses, such as those by Paolo Uccello. The figures carry banners in the form of narrow computer windows displaying the eponymous error message ​“An unnamed file contains an incorrect path.” This plays on common system messages, while other windows display more existential statements. Other symbols, such as the sun and moon, also appear on the desktop. Above the sculpture, Scherer has applied three interlocking hands clad in white gloves, reminiscent of a medieval symbol. They form a kind of loop with no beginning and no end.

In Scherer’s work, different systems of thought and belief converge. The symbols she employs create dislocations and disruptions that both reveal and subvert these systems. This brings into focus the question of how reality is constructed in the first place through signs and systems. The artist conceives her interfaces as productive orders or world-making: the fictional keyboard becomes a metaphor for a code that enables alternative conceptions of reality while simultaneously revealing the contingency of established sign systems. Thus, the intertwining of pre-modern forms of knowledge and digital aesthetics appears as part of a continuous history of symbolic order-making.

An unnamed file contains an incorrect path, 2021
Wooden sculpture, painting on canvas, mural
Screen: 214 × 330 cm; keyboard: 214 × 330 cm
Courtesy of the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin; Sans Titre, Paris