Hitchcock’s film Frenzy is a mercilessly cynical thriller, shocking and morally rather ambivalent. Frenzy signifies madness, fury, passion. Frenzi, on the other hand, is a popular Swiss nickname for Franziska. A nice name, a friendly name. It is within this field of tension, which ranges from harmlessness to neurosis, that Frenzi – Franziska – Rigling’s art moves; despite all its sheer materiality, it still has something slightly quirky and absurd about it.

In Diagramm, Frenzi Rigling has made her own life her subject. On 365 DIN A4 sheets she drew the various pieces of clothing that she wore each day over a whole year, from spring 2005 to spring 2006. 365 times skirt, blouse, under- wear, shoes. Depending on the season there are also coats and jackets, or hats, as well. What was to be worn the next day was drawn by the artist the evening before. Sketches made in black felt-tip pen, in simple, schematic lines, rapidly and in a deliberately trivial manner. The outline of the shape is the integrating stylistic element. Matter-of-factly, and in almost identical repetitions, Frenzi Rigling lists her wardrobe day for day, week for week, month for month and, according to her intention, year for year. Although the motifs, which are per- fectly-declined on sheet after sheet, suggest the sublime Semperian ideals of enveloping, covering and security, Rigling rids her subjects of all glamour – in view of the unconcealed functionality that is being exhibited. Zealously, she documents the daily routine of her choreography of the body. The pattern book as a cipher for the stages of life. As strictly conceptually structured works, Rigling’s diary pages can be classified together with the self-portraits and self- presentations made by those artists who deal with the differentiated image of women’s search for identity, ranging from Cindy Shermann to Friedl Kubelka Bondy.

The objectivity of the representation is committed to positivistic models of natural science, to demonstrable truths and to a certain fundamental sense of reality. Frenzi Rigling is a highly subtle draughtswoman, who brings to life the finest shades of the coloured Stabilo pen soft colour 1500/300. In her diary, entitled “Women’s Wear Daily”, she denies herself any kind of emotion. She breaks the drawing down to a diagram and releases its contents for critical analysis. Whoever looks at it receives information about how the artist sees and presents herself. And, in doing so, she exposes those manipulative mechanisms which form the basis of the clichés and fatuous social agreements entered into with regard to the subjects of women, family, representation and identity.

Pieces of clothing – in many cases those of her own family – have been used time and again by Frenzi Rigling as material for her installations. Whether they are sewn into an endless carpet, left to rot in the Leiser Mountains in Weinvier- tel or – as is the case in the current exhibition – fitted into one another to make shoe-in-shoe sculptures, the motif of one’s own actions, or the work itself, plays an essential role in the practice of this artist.

On the monitor can be seen Hitchcock’s film. The murderer is a greengrocer and hides the corpse in a potato sack. The horror within everyday life consti- tutes the driving force behind Frenzi Rigling’s elastic systems.