Izabel Angerer; Resistance, Slowness, and the Constructive Abstract

by Guy Woueté

Izabel Angerer’s artistic practice is defined by tension, between drawing and painting, structure and spontaneity, solitude and collectivity, destruction and delicacy. Over decades, she has forged what she calls a “constructive abstract language”, a visual grammar that emerges through repetition, resistance, and the slow accumulation of gesture. Her work is emotional without illustration, conceptual without losing the physicality of hand and material, vibrating in the space between grid and stain, silence and resonance.

Born in a small mountain village in Tyrol (Austria), Izabel’s early life was shaped by a sense of being an outsider. She recalls how the mountains felt overwhelming, closing her mind, and how even as a child she longed to leave, seeking openness and possibility. After school, she moved to Vienna and worked in theater, until the intensity of that period led her back to her first love: drawing. “I always had this need to just sit and draw,” she says. Her journey took her to Antwerp, where she studied at the academy. The experience was formative but fraught; she encountered teachers who doubted women’s capacity to paint and insisted that only suffering and frustration could produce real art. “I’m the complete opposite,” she says. “You cannot tell me what I can or cannot do.” This resistance became foundational, shaping both her art and her sense of self.

Izabel’s experience as a woman artist is marked by both struggle and reflection. In the 1990s, she recalls, “we didn’t have this confidence. It was only in the 2000s that women artists started to appear internationally.” She is acutely aware of the fragility of these gains, insisting that real equality remains elusive and that the position of women in the art world can be taken away easily. She is critical of “fake feminism” and the myth that women now “run the world”, and remains vigilant about the need for genuine change.

Her practice resists easy categorization. “Sometimes I ask myself, what am I doing now? Is this a painting? A drawing? Or does it matter?” She often begins with constructive systems (grids, repeated marks, prepared surfaces) but then lets the work “grow out of the structure”. The transformation comes when spontaneity interrupts control, often through an emotional gesture or a literal stain. “The structure is there, but then the ‘tache’ happens. I don’t provoke it, I let it happen. That’s when the work transforms”. Her exhibition La Structure et la Tache (The Structure and the Stain) was inspired by the writings of Michel Seuphor and her daughter’s fascination with his work. For Izabel, the title is both technical and personal: order and chaos, form and rupture, coexisting on the same surface.

Abstraction, for Izabel, is not an escape from meaning but a way to reach something more essential than narrative. “With figuration, I always told a story. Now I’m more interested in feeling what's behind the story”. Her work channels complex emotions, loneliness, fear, the urge to destroy into creative force. “Destruction is a very strong emotion”, she explains. “But I use it to create. When I destroy the surface, it gives me a kind of release. It’s not about power, but about transformation”. Time is central to her practice, not just as a material dimension, but as a form of resistance. “I always feel haunted by time”, she admits. The studio becomes a refuge, a place to reject the capitalist demand for speed and productivity. “I don’t work fast. I don’t think fast. Repetition is key: “It’s the meditation part. You do it again and again, and it takes over. That’s when the work starts to resonate. People tell me they can hear my works, even if they don’t make sound”. For Izabel, slowness is not just a method but

a political stance. “Slowness is a force of nature”, she insists. Her upcoming project under that title aims to foster deep, sustained collaboration, not for quick results, but for a more meaningful artistic exchange.

Izabel’s works blur the line between drawing and sculpture, often becoming objects that activate space. “The space doesn’t have to define what you do, you can define the space”, she says. She recalls the revelation of transferring a drawing to a wall: “The work took over the space. It was mind-blowing”. In a garden house exhibition, a silver-backgrounded work reflected sunlight, creating a shimmering, pulsating stain. Visitors described a sense of calm and recognition. “That’s what I want, that confirmation of the human heart in you. Structure is there, but you need the freedom of the stain”. Her use of repetition, puncture, and color vibration creates a “tremor”, not just visual, but emotional and sonic. “It’s not always visible. But it’s felt”.

For years, Izabel protected her slow tempo by working alone. Recently, she has moved toward collaboration, seeking deeper artistic exchange. A two-year project with four other artists in Denmark was transformative: “There was no ego. We made the whole thing shine”. Her involvement with the artist-run collective Archipel in Antwerp has also shifted her perspective. “It’s a little universe, community, conflict, chaos, discovery. It does a lot for me to participate actively”. She sees artist-run spaces as necessary counterbalances to a commercial system that often devalues artists. “They can take power back”, she says, though she acknowledges the challenge of sustainability: “You need freedom, but you also need structure. And sometimes you need to let things fall apart”.

There is a spiritual dimension to Izabel’s work, not religious, but energetic and cosmic. “You’re freeing certain powers that are there”, she says. Her gestures are charged with emotion; her surfaces transformed by touch, cut, repetition, and breath. “It goes beyond the material world”. What remains constant in Izabel’s practice is a refined attention to material, patience, and feeling. “Even when I was drawing feathers as a child, I wanted them to feel like they could be blown away. I felt like a feather”. Now, with her daughter grown, she finds new freedom and intensity for her work. “I just want enough time and money, not to feel guilty when I spend a day in the studio”. From that space, the work comes: calm, care, and a refusal to rush.

Izabel Angerer’s art is a practice of resistance, against speed, against easy definitions, against the erasure of feeling. It is a search for resonance, for the tremor beneath the surface, for the freedom of the stain.