FRITZ PANZER

23.01.—12.03.2026

About the exhibition

For example a suitcase

In 1964, the Museum of the 20th Century in Vienna hosted the exhibition “Pop etc.” featuring works by Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol. For me, that was a big surprise.

At that time, Tachism, Informel, and abstract art were very much in vogue. But this was something different. Everyday life had broken into high art. I knew immediately that this was my thing too.

I was less interested in the striking nature of this new art form than in the idea that intensive engagement with an object from the consumer world can have the same artistic value as, say, a depiction of the Madonna. Removed from its immediate surroundings, an object becomes the vehicle for its own inner image. This reminds me of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, who needed only a few bottles and vases in his paintings to achieve incredible intensity.

At that time, I began constructing sculptures out of inexpensive brown cardboard. A kitchen, a bedroom, always in actual size. However, there were also sacred objects or works by other artists that became motifs, for example, a side altar in the Servite Church in Vienna or the Wotruba sculpture on the “Zweierlinie”. I liked the idea that works of art could thus also be elevated to the level of everyday objects.

The first wire sculptures were created in 2000. I call them three-dimensional drawings. For example, a suitcase, a shoe box, a washbasin, a record player, a Viennese cube clock. Wire has less body than cardboard. What remains in the sculpture is the line of the drawing.

(Fritz Panzer, 2025)

There is agreement that art cannot serve the purpose of repeating nature, that is, of reproducing what is visually given. Art can no longer be understood as an image or likeness of nature, but rather as a creation, as the objectification and expression of human beings in their physical and spiritual reality, as an optically and haptically tangible and lasting reflection of their intuition and imagination.

So what is the purpose of Fritz Panzer’s reconstructed, reduplicated beds, kitchen cabinets, and altar fragments?

Let there be no misunderstanding: this is not repetition. This is the creation of that second world called art: that intermediate world between nature and spirit which, once created, is useless, yet is reality and effectiveness above and against nature, where intellect and imagination can be constantly rekindled.

(Otto Mauer, 1971)

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