Maria Bussmann

Biography

Maria Bussmann was born in 1966 in Würzburg, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg from 1987-93. In 1999, she completed her PhD in Art and Philosophy at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. From 2002 to 2004, she was a Visiting scholar at SUNY Stony Brook New York. She furthermore works as a lector for Critical Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She lives in Vienna and New York.

Maria Bussmann works predominantly with the media drawing and sculpture, her work focusses, related to her PhD, mostly on the juxtaposition and collaboration of drawing and philosophy. Her works are inspired by works by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Spinoza, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt. Through her drawings, she seeks to visualise these philosophers’ thought process and respond to it. In this sense, she uses drawing as a continuation of writing, the power of which being, perhaps, even more immediate. She furthermore creates sculpture from papier-mâché, objets trouvés and colour. These works often depicts landscapes, such as glaciers, waterfalls and woods.

Bussmann was dyslexic as a child. However, reading out loud to her mother taught her slow-reading. Reading slowly, constructing and reconstructing sentences so as to catch their meaning influenced her significantly and also led her to philosophy.