ELISA ALBERTI
Monochromatic shades and geometric configurations—Elisa Alberti’s oeuvre is known for its clear and precise formal language, within which stringent renditions of pared- down shapes intersect with precise painterly technique. Within her current exhibition “Transcending Forms” at Galerie Krobath, Vienna, the artist embarks on a nuanced exploration of expanding and refining her individual lexicon of forms, thus engaging in a dialogue with reflections on the canvas surface, declaring an initial progression towards sculpture and object.
Drawing inspiration from the Neo-Geo movement of the 1980s, featuring notable figures such as Gerwald Rockenschaub, Alberti embraces the abstract essence, steering clear of narrative distractions in her artistic endeavors. The artist immerses herself in a precisely defined spectrum of color and symbolism, originally rooted in an exploration or organic forms like botanical sketches and paintings, interwoven with abstract motifs. Evolving over time, Alberti systematically attenuated these motifs, pushing them towards the limit of abstraction until their tether to the tangible dissolved entirely–a vocabulary of shape, encouraging the viewer to reflect on the potential of minute deviations and subtle shifts to gain new configurations, arrangements of color and interesting layouts.
Within “Transcending Forms” the artist reintroduces chromatic experimentation, notably with cobalt blue gracing two works within the exhibition. It is within these compositions that the delicate nuances and subtle differentiations of color fields manifest conspicuously. The canvas intermittently permeates, unveiling an interplay of luminosity, shadow, and tonal contrasts. Furthermore, a series of works on natural linen stands out, showcasing the artist’s deliberate choice to leave areas and forms open. This intentional approach allows the canvas’s texture to subtly emerge, resulting in a delicate composition of color.
Within the exhibition Alberti introduces a substantial sculptural component to the space. Positioned on the right side of the gallery, an object crafted from brushed aluminum, articulated in the artist’s distinctive formal language, beckons viewers to engage in a comprehensive exploration of its form. Devoid of a traditional pedestal, the sculpture seamlessly integrates into the gallery space, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in Alberti’s evocative formal vocabulary through its multidimensional presence.
“Transcending Forms” serves as an introspective contemplation of Alberti’s own artistic praxis. Entailing a deliberate revisiting of previously explored elements, the artist seeks to harness their latent potential anew and thus creates new configurations of geometric forms, color arrangements and three-dimensional works.
Text: Livia Klein
Sophia Süßmilch
Verehrte Sophia: Also sehe ich dein live laugh love die cry hate und wahrlich ich sage dir: Das elaboriert antiquierte Beidltum Österreichs bedenkt die neuen Farben und erkennt die besonderen Sujets und ordnet ein, was einzuordnen im typischen Beidltum von Österreich ganz gelernt und studiert zu erkennen, was oberflächlich zu erkennen ist sich in Wissen von den Wissenswapplern ganz und gar. Denn solches sieht mit Augen vom Arsche her und sieht, wie ein Arsch sieht. Das ist normal in Österreich. Nun wahrlich aber ich sage dir, dass sie damit nicht eingehen unter dein Dach da in Würde und mit Wahrheit. Denn in Wahrheit ist es so:
Her als definitiv
Heiliges zu sagen du willst
Heiliges sehr so sehr dass
Heiliges du bist es auch ganz
Heiliges so drin in der vollends
Heiligeswesensart auf alles
Heiliges durch Mark und Bein in
Heiliges, dass du dich fragen magst
Heiliges derart in Gewinn wo
Heiliges ist in dir zu dir wirr
Heiliges von den Freuden her sehr
Heiligesdrin dassd dich anzuspeiben
Heiligesdrin dassd dich anzuscheißen
Heiliges willst nicht und nie da
Heiliges geben noch nehmen zu
Heiliges zu sehr da in der tu
Heiliges an mir jetzt und ich sehe
Heiliges in und an dem Sein rein
Heiliges wo noch keines ist da:
Her als definitiv Heiliges zu sagen du willst Heiliges sehr so sehr dass Heiliges du bist es auch ganz Heiliges so drin in der vollends Heiligeswesensart auf alles Heiliges durch Mark und Bein in Heiliges, dass du dich fragen magst Heiliges derart in Gewinn wo Heiliges ist in dir zu dir wirr Heiliges von den Freuden her sehr Heiligesdrin dassd dich anzuspeiben Heiligesdrin dassd dich anzuscheißen Heiliges willst nicht und nie da Heiliges geben noch nehmen zu Heiliges zu sehr da in der tu Heiliges an mir jetzt und ich sehe Heiliges in und an dem Sein rein Heiliges wo noch keines ist da:
Her als definitiv
Sophia Süßmilch zu sagen du willst
Sophia Süßmilch sehr so sehr dass
Sophia Süßmilch du bist es auch ganz
Sophia Süßmilch so drin in der vollends
Sophia Süßmilchwesensart auf alles
Sophia Süßmilch durch Mark und Bein in
Sophia Süßmilch, dass du dich fragen magst
Sophia Süßmilch derart in Gewinn wo
Sophia Süßmilch ist in dir zu dir wirr
Sophia Süßmilch von den Freuden her sehr
Sophia Süßmilchdrin dassd dich anzuspeiben
Sophia Süßmilchdrin dassd dich anzuscheißen
Sophia Süßmilch willst nicht und nie da
Sophia Süßmilch geben noch nehmen zu
Sophia Süßmilch zu sehr da in der tu
Sophia Süßmilch an mir jetzt und ich sehe
Sophia Süßmilch in und an dem Sein rein
Sophia Süßmilch wo noch keine ist da:
Her als definitiv Sophia Süßmilch zu sagen du willst Sophia Süßmilch sehr so sehr dass Sophia Süßmilch du bist es auch ganz Sophia Süßmilch so drin in der vollends Sophia Süßmilchwesensart auf alles Sophia Süßmilch durch Mark und Bein in Sophia Süßmilch, dass du dich fragen magst Sophia Süßmilch derart in Gewinn wo Sophia Süßmilch ist in dir zu dir wirr Sophia Süßmilch von den Freuden her sehr Sophia Süßmilchdrin dassd dich anzuspeiben Sophia Süßmilchdrin dassd dich anzuscheißen Sophia Süßmilch willst nicht und nie da Sophia Süßmilch geben noch nehmen zu Sophia Süßmilch zu sehr da in der tu Sophia Süßmilch an mir jetzt und ich sehe Sophia Süßmilch in und an dem Sein rein Sophia Süßmilch wo noch keine ist da.
Text: Lydia Haider zu Sophia Süßmilchs live laugh love die cry hate.
Julian Opie
Last summer we were stuck in town and were often out in the park. I began to notice the way people were lounging in various sized groups, their bodies in a variety of positions that were both evocative and very human. Each group looked classic in some way and reminded me of Manet’s famous painting. Our bodies and limbs and the effects of gravity and balance mean there are a certain number of positions possible where we can relax and interact at the same time.
Pretending to text on my phone I took surreptitious photos of the groups.
I asked my daughter and three of her friends to come to the studio with a range of casual clothes and take up the positions I had noted in the parks. My assistant and I took photographs of them from all sides and I set about trying to draw them with a series of straight lines, as if they were pieces of furniture.
It proved very difficult. I am used to tracing and copying photos as flat images, but this was different. We called the models back and used an iPhone app to scan them. This worked much better, avoiding the distortions of photography and giving a lot more information. Still it was tricky, and I had to repeatedly get my assistants to turn my drawings into 3D computer models that I could spin and adjust in space. Each of the four models took up the various poses in different outfits, and a group of around 24 figures began to emerge. I planned to put these into picnic style groups with contrasting poses.
I placed these statues in a virtual gallery and used VR goggles to enter the space with them. The programme allowed me to see all 24 statues and to move them around into my preferred groups of four. Previous statues have always been flat like extruded drawings and this allowed me to cut them from flat sheet material like plywood, bronze or aluminium. More recently, using straight lines, I built sculptures from steel I-beams and wooden bars. But square cut materials were not working with these new figures that bent in various directions. It’s hard to explain but you can cut and angle a square tube in one direction, creating a mitred corner, but as soon as you twist this the corner goes out of line and won’t work. The only solution was to switch to round tube which can twist cleanly in any direction. This was a revelation. I became aware of round tube everywhere. As handrails on the stairs down to the underground painted gloss black. As barriers at the football stadium painted gloss white. Stainless steel hoops on the pavement to lock up your bike. With this round tube technology, I could manage almost any angle and also create curved lines.
For some years I have been looking at wooden statues from Indonesia from the late 19th and early 20th century. These were made by tribal people of the Austronesian culture across Borneo and Sulawesi, Vietnam and Sumba. They are very frontal, but in some cases I noted that the knees were bent and began to find some where the whole body was folded into a squatting position. It was this that suggested to me the possibility of breaking the flat method I had always used. I began to look at the people around me in a different way, noticing their poses and how their limbs allow for various solutions and complex planar folds. In the airport I noticed people leaning and crouching against the wall and this gave me the idea for an alternate set of figures where both the floor and the wall are used as supports for the figures.
Usually an artist puts paintings or sculptures into a gallery and they are looked at by the audience who are also in the space but in another, parallel sense. I wanted to people the space with images of the audience itself. I plan to inhabit the gallery as if it were a public park or a waiting room. with images of the audience itself. I planned to inhabit the gallery as if it were a public park or a waiting room.
Text: Julian Opie
Exhibition opening: June 11, 2022
Duration: June 11 – July 30, 2022
Sofie Thorsen
Shards
Data frenzy and global communication in real-time have given rise to a new form of media-related one’s own time. The possibility to be connected to everybody nonstop via digital networks has destroyed all hope that we could be the masters of time. The past dwindles and the future eludes any kind of control. The feeling of timelessness coupled with the feeling of our own vulnerability in a world that has come out of joint, is not only a phenomenon of today’s life that is dominated by the pandemic, social dislocations and climate change. The Viennese sociologist Helga Nowotny scrutinised the question of how changes in society affect the sense of time as early as 1989 in her book Eigenzeit (1) Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience. The feeling of losing time also highlights the question of one’s own existence and the fear of vanishing without a trace. In short, the question of what remains of us and why.
The Danish artist Sofie Thorsen, who has been living in Vienna since the late 1990ies, has for many years addressed the role of archives, depots, historical images and archaeological collections as storages for our cultural and socio-political memory in her stripped-down drawings, collages and sculptures. And here, the artist is mainly intrigued by the gaps, the missing parts or things that have disappeared from contemporary collective memory or the visible sphere. Because the question of what and how it is collected, archived, studied or destroyed is always a mirror of a certain economic, political and social situation.
Sofie Thorsen’s large-format frottages in black and white and wall objects that are featured in the present exhibition at the Krobath Gallery, are based on objects from the archaeological collection of the Odense City Museum in Denmark. She scoured the digital database for prehistoric vessel shards, stone tools, bronze objects and jewellery, that had been meticulously measured, numbered and photographed before they vanished in a depot again. Thorsen saves the objects from falling into oblivion, so to speak, by blowing up their pictures, printing and multiplying them, cutting out the images along their outlines and putting them together again in collages. This creates a relief-like surface structure that allows the artist to transfer break lines and edges of the objects onto paper. By putting together the collaged parts in new arrangements, and by shifting or mirroring them, she creates abstract-figurative structures with the different parts interpenetrating. And despite being stripped down to the outlines of the objects, they gain spatial quality. Compact, overlapping forms are juxtaposed with expanding blank spaces. The relationship between the individual forms is thus more important than the recognition of each single form. In addition to her interest in the material and aesthetic form of the artefacts she chooses from the archives, the focus of her work is also always on the conscious methodological understanding of why a certain artistic method has been used. Criteria like when, why and which artistic methods have been used to convey the content, always call for shifts in the form or content. In that way, individual or collective memory can be compared with a collage. Items from the past are fragmented, juxtaposed and rearranged and put into a new context with reference to current social and cultural circumstances. Significances are emptied, overlapped and recomposed in a fragmentary manner. By setting the constructive process of collage against the automatised process of frottage, Thorsen creates a distance to the object and at the same time a ghostly closeness through the appearance of silhouettes from the past in the present day. Max Ernst, who started using and appreciating the potential of frottage in the 1920ies, referred to this technique as “a technical means to increase the hallucinatory capacities of the mind so that ‘visions’ automatically appear – a means to rid oneself of one’s own blindness.” (2)
Maybe it is the desire to save the past from falling into oblivion, or the desire to give the hazy silhouettes facticity or to make the ephemeral permanent, that urges Sofie Thorsen to create small cast reliefs thus giving material presence to the “automatic visions” that appear in the artistic process of frottage. In this exhibition, Thorsen presents a dialectical game of distance and closeness, attendance and absence in the immediate presence of the exhibition space, the portrayal of a society that is picking up the pieces of its broken present times and putting it together again for the future.
(1) NOWOTNY, Helga. Eigenzeit. Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefühls, Suhrkamp, 1989.
(English title: Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience)
(2) Schamony, Ernst: Max Ernst, Münster, 2009, S. 32.
Text by: Fiona Liewehr
English translation by: Mandana Taban
Ugo Rondinone
“You must be able to feel an artwork.”
Ugo Rondinone is one of the most successful artists of his generation on an international level. His work utilises various media like painting, sculpture, film and installation and rests on a multiplex and multifaceted system of references from German Romanticism to the American land art. His works are basically an attempt to visualise temporality and the contrast of spirituality and the commonplace.
“Doing art and being an artist is a philosophical task rather than one to do with producing objects.”
Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen in Switzerland. From 1986 to 1990 he studied under Ernst Caramelle at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 1998 he moved to New York and has been living and working there ever since. He works as an artist, poet, collector and curator. In 2007 he represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale. Today, his works are part of museum collections around the world.
“I am waiting for my head to become totally empty. Like a space no one has entered yet, a room without a door or a window. A place where nothing happens.”
The internationally acclaimed artist has been pushing boundaries across various media and disciplines for more than three decades. In highly artificial installations featuring multiplex references to art history and pop culture, he creates evocative atmospheres thus capturing the spirit of contemporary life. “A multi-media artist at the intersection of Conceptual Art and Romanticism, whose imagery confronts the viewers with a new reality, which they inevitably become a part of”, reads in a text on the website of Belvedere 21. Akt in der Landschaft (nude in the landscape) is Rondinone’s first solo exhibition in an Austrian museum and will be featured in Belvedere 21 from November 25, 2021 to May 1, 2022. And we are pleased to announce his concurrent sixth solo exhibition (after 1993, 1998, 2002, 2021 and 2015) at Helga Krobath’s gallery.
“Like a diarist, I record the living universe; this sun, this cloud, this rain, this tree, this animal, this season, this day, this hour, this wind, this kind of earth, this kind of water, this sound in the grass, this pitch of wind, this silence.”
In Belvedere 21, Ugo Rondinone’s work is grouped into classic genres of the nude and the landscape (in addition to the landscapes, sculptures made of soil which among other things refer to Minimal Art, the exhibition will also include hyperrealistic nudes that look like introverted naked figures made of clear wax and soil). For the exhibition at Krobath Wien, he has created a spatial experience which is similarly meditative but at the same time very colourful and full of references to Romanticism, land art and pop art.
“Art goes beyond language. Poetry as well. They have similarities. They are slow. They create their own temporality.”
Nature as an integrative part of Ugo Rondinone’s works is just as important as the poetic juxtapositions. Day and night. Small and large. Inside and outside. Everything is imbued with melancholy, loneliness and silence. Quite a few examples come to mind, including the life-size olive tree made of cast aluminium and enamelled in white which was presented by the Museum of Art History in 2012 at the reopening of the Theseustemple in the Vienna Volksgarten, after extensive renovations.
“I deal with very basic symbols that everybody can relate to.”
The present exhibition at the Krobath Wien (November 04 – December 22, 2021) has a poetic and at the same time indicative title: a low sun . golden mountains . fall. It encompasses thirteen sculptures from Rondinone’s mountain – works and two of his sun paintings. Land art meets pop art. Stones painted in excessive colours are piled up and fixed to one another through a construction made of stainless steel. In this exhibition they are combined with airbrushed circles in fluorescent, acrylic colours on round canvases, which are titled with the date of their completion thus contrasting the idea of the timelessness of an artwork with a precise date. The result is a unique experience in a meditative-mystical space, which lies beyond the here-and-now and yet also right in the centre of our present time.
“In case of boredom, recite the ABC more often”
Vito Baumüller . Julie Bender Herdina . Gabi Blum . Leona Boltes . Felix Burger . Böhler & Orendt . Brad Downey . Anne Duk HeeJordan . Christian Eisenberger . Moritz Frei . Frankfurter Hauptschule . Andrew Gilbert . Veronika Günther . Leon Höllhumer . Claudia Holzinger/Lilly Urbat . Christian Jankowski . Anna Ley . Hoa Luong . Patricia Martsch . Anna McCarthy . Monika Michalko . Jannik Richard . Stefanie Sargnagel . Kristina Schmidt . Sophia Süßmilch . Veli & Amos . Valentin Wagner . Marcel Walldorf . Nouchka Wolf . Thomas Zipp
In this year’s edition of the gallery festival curated by 2021, SPATZI SPEZIAL (Sophia Süßmilch and Valentin Wagner) will be curating an exhibition entitled “In case of boredom, recite the ABC more often”, embedding the festival’s theme “Comedy” into an artificial order. The decisive factor here is not the topic, chronology, quantities or the context of the works, but our alphabet with its artificial order of a finite number of objects. Alpha and omega. The duo SPATZI SPEZIAL thus subvert the current forms of exhibition as well as reception. With this act of refusal, they merely seem to elude a certain discourse, just pretending not to play along – and they fail miserably.
The original idea for this project is from Sophia Süßmilch’s video from 2011 entitled “In case of boredom, recite the ABC more often”, where the artist appears before the camera wearing a bee costume in Coney Island, New York, languidly reciting the ABC. When she is finished, she adds dryly: “Well, nothing much going on here” and leaves the picture.
Well, we’re curious to see what will be going on at curated by 2021. If it’s boring, we can all just go home.
The exhibition also extends into the small room at the back of the gallery. The room will be turned into a chamber of horrors as the artists dabble in a classic genre, namely clown portraits.
The works by the participating artists move between cheerfulness and gloom and enjoy revealing the abysses of the human soul. For this exhibition, SPATZI SPEZIAL have invited artists who inspired them in their own works, including some well-known names, but also some hot new discoveries from the duo’s milieu.
PERFORMANCE
Saturday, September 4, 2021 at 5pm
“ULK-KULT MIT PATZI UND FELIX: DAS GRENZÜBERSCHREITENDE KULTSTÜCK”
A Performance by and with Patricia Martsch and Felix Maria Zeppenfeld, with a figure by Anna Pelz.
Sebastian Koch
There is a certain humor in Sebastian Koch’s definition of the line in his paintings. The line is disturbing the surface, it creates a dialogue between the surface of the canvas and the line and is also creating space in the painting. He is drawing the line until the associative potential is taking over the surface and is creating some references ‘outside’ of the canvas. Lines are somehow becoming signs which we cannot read literally as something known or concrete. But we are getting into some idea of these forms even if they remain enigmatic at all. On the other hand Koch is guiding our attention to the painting as a construction of material when he is using a certain framing that gives us the possibility of examining the edges of the canvas. This framing is a reference to the painting of the 50s when painting was facing this major theoretical problem: Is painting a field of projections of the outside world or is it just a construction of material? Koch is playing with both approaches discussing them with a humorous notification that signs and meaning will always remain uncertain or in some way unclear.
In his works, Sebastian Koch does not apply a reductionist approach, abstracting certain forms from a given reference model. His works do not represent the painstaking reproduction of a model, be it in nature or in art. Nor are they the result of a constant testing of the artistic medium for the sake of it. For Koch, everything is material and as a result his approach is rather playful. However, he does not differentiate between artistic material, conceptual material and the actual material with which the paintings (and modern sculpture) are created, namely paint, wood, frame, canvas etc. Of course it goes without saying that he is in a constant dialogue with art. For as soon as he makes even the slightest intrusion into the painting medium, the game begins and with it the burden of representation. Painting and the discourse thereof has developed enough since the beginning of the 20th century to be ripe with subjects for discussion. Koch’s palpable thirst for this debate, which goes far beyond art is also reflected in title of this exhibition.
Text: Harald Krejci
Gerwald Rockenschaub
Galerie Krobath is pleased to host its first solo exhibition of Gerwald Rockenschaub (*1952 in Linz, lives and works in Berlin). Under the title “astrobot(n)ic / philanthropic / this/that interlude (vision)” Rockenschaub presents pieces created especially for this exhibition, which oscillate between abstraction and representationalism and are a direct reflection of the artist’s continuing perceptual-psychological exploration. On the one hand, there are large-format composite pieces made of Plexiglas in which different elements are pieced together into a single motif so seamlessly, that the individual layers are only apparent upon closer inspection. The question of what one is actually looking at is also thematized in his new group of engravings, which comprise some of Rockenschaub’s most subtle work. At first glance, they appear to be monochrome Plexiglas pieces, the surfaces of which reflect the surrounding space. However, when viewed from a different angle, finely engraved drawings emerge, sparking strings of associations.
The images we see, or think we see in the engravings, change depending on our viewpoint and the way the light hits them. They could be interpreted as a political message, as a kind of challenge to constantly change our point of view. But perhaps another interpretation can be gleaned by the title “astrobot(n)ic / philanthropic / this/that interlude (vision)”. It hits us like sound poetry. The words, not unlike the minimalistic lines of the engravings, invoke countless associations with reality. Due to the rhythmic emphasis, one could easily imagine the cryptic slogan as a rapped refrain in a piece of electronic club music. That would make Rockenschaub’s new engravings something like visual music or musical visions that set us in motion – and maybe even get us dancing in the end.
Caroline Corleone | Theresa Eipeldauer | Anna Meyer | Muntean/Rosenblum | Haleh Redjaian | Esther Stocker | Katja Strunz | Sofie Thorsen | Jenni Tischer
CAROLINE CORLEONE
Born in Erlangen, G. Lives and works in Berlin, G.
Caroline Corleone’s art touches on the fundamental painting movements of the past decades as abstract expressionism or color field painting. However, being on the pulse of time, she often finds inspiration
in post-media strategies of copying and digital montage. She likes to use fabrics, plays wildly with pat- terns, or „paints“ with her sewing machine on canvas. Her artworks draw the bow between the real, the digital, and the painted: Artificial forms of imitated nature meet urban interventions, abstract brush- strokes cross fragments and leftovers of repetitive digital patterns.
The new series of works is inspired by the textile designer Mathilde Flögl (Wiener Werkstätte). The more or less random shapes of Flögl’s textile cuts from the MAK archive (on-site research in February 2019) are the starting point for new compositions, enhanced with graphic “drawings” by sewing machine. The pattern series PPI * finds a continuation in the Flögl series, in that given patterns find form as fragmentary substitutes in blow ups as independent artistic works.
THERESA EIPELDAUER
Born 1985 in Vienna, A. Lives and works in Vienna, A
The point of departure for Jenni Tischer’s latest exhibition fortune at the Krobath Gallery was two different kinds of found objects: on the one hand, there are numerous vintage knitting needles, which the artist purchased at a warehouse sale and then turned each one of them into artfully knitted sculptures and wall objects.
The basic element in Eipeldauer’s drawings is the line, which is constantly multiplied thus preempting industrialprocesses. Reproduction techniques used since the 20th century are very present in her works. Eipeldauer also treats the transition from the individual art piece to environment in her works playfully and with artful ease. The urge to define her three-dimensional works either as an ensemble or as individual works of art automatically recedes towards the background and the decision is left to the viewers. As Heike Maier-Rieper aptly puts it, the transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional works results in “an ambivalence between transparency and disguise”. From: Heike Maier-Rieper. “Theresa Eipeldauer.” in: 95-2015 Jubilee evn collection. Wien: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2015.
ANNA MEYER
Born 1964 in Schaffhausen, CH. Lives and works in Vienna, A.
In her works (paintings, drawings, models, interventions in public spaces) Anna Meyer addresses modern global culture and the socio-political and feminist issues of neoliberal societies in an ironic and provocative manner.
„In the past few years, in the face of neo-liberal globalisation and the increasingly manifest climate catastrophe, painting in particular has presented itself as an aesthetic titbit, or as “a fetish and a pointless gimmick for those who would ignore the impending flood,” as the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno put it. But Anna Meyer’s paintings have never been part of this game. On the contrary, her socio-critical reflections always go hand in hand with her visual motifs and their formal implementation”. From: Raimer Stange „Nostalgia for an age yet to come“.
The current drawings in the exhibition were created in the first phase of the Corona lockdown in March 2020 and thus establish a very current reference to time.
(more…)
Josef Bauer | Hertha Hurnaus | Fritz Panzer | Sofie Thorsen
JOSEF BAUER
1934 born in Wels (A), Lives and works in Linz and Gunskirchen (A).
Since the 1950s, some artists – including Josef Bauer – turned to language in order to break the mold in sculpture. Like many of his contemporaries, Bauer was searching for an artistic vocabulary that would make it possible to comprehend the world again. A world that was facing huge upheavals and reforms after the end of the Second World War. A world ‘in crisis’ presents artists, in particular, with great challenges and the question of which stories can be told when lived history goes far beyond the limits of the imagination. A world that has fallen apart must be put back together again or its stories told on a different level.
Bauer’s work was influenced by media and information theories of the 1960s. “
“At the beginning of the sixties, I was interested in the body in space, and I focused on the area between the body and its surroundings.” Josef Bauer.
When Bauer set off to appropriate the world on a new, abstract level, writing became increasingly important to him in formulating his ‘Picture Languages’. From: Harald Krejci „Explorations, 2019.
HERTHA HURNAUS
1951 born in Linz (A). Lives and works in Vienna (A).
The photographs of Hertha Hurnaus are dedicated to the works of the architect Vladimir Dedeček, which were built between 1960 and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. The photos, however, are not documentary in nature, but rather an homage to an era of change in the field of architecture. As the images focus on interiors and details, the buildings are only recognisable to experts. They emphasise the common features of these structures: colour compositions that are reminiscent of abstract works of art. Located barely an hour’s drive from Vienna, these buildings are not unlike spaceships that have just returned to earth from an optimistic future. From: Oliver Elser „Hertha Hurnaus“, 2015.
FRITZ PANZER
1945 born in Judenburg (A). Lives and works in Vienna (A).
According to Wikipedia this technique was first used in China 2000 years ago. A wooden frame and human hair for mesh were used to make the screen and leaves were used for stencils. This is probably how the very first screen prints were made.
Applying colour through a screen of fabric. That’s how I would describe the technique I used to create these works. I don’t want to use the term “screen printing”, as reproduction was never my intention. These works are unique.
Screen printing is a very efficient method to apply multiple layers of colour. Here it was done in the simplest possible manner: I used one of my mother’s curtains as mesh to make the screen, the stencils were made of pieces of newspaper and the colour pigments were mixed with hide glue. Fritz Panzer, 2021.
SOFIE THORSEN
1971 born in Aarhus (D). Lives and works in Vienna (A).
The engraved drawings relate to the colour and shape of the stone. The thin line is in the foreground thus lending the surface of the stone a three-dimensional quality, which was less perceptible before.
The stones themselves are random found pieces, leftovers of masonry and construction work. Fragments of an entity which will never become whole again. Sofie Thosen, 2021.
The exhibition at the Pinakothek der Moderne, München presents the objects related to Bauhaus in the collection of the Museum on the occasion of the anniversary of the founding of Bauhaus. As one of five contemporary artists, Sofie Thorsen was invited to examine Bauhaus works from the museum collection. Her construction elements, large-format raw wire models, refer to 8 small objects by the artist and architect Herrmann Finsterlin, the Didyms, where Didym stands for twin or double. Partly toys, partly geometrical models, partly prototypes, these colorful combinations of simple shapes deny any clear definition, but they could have been intended as a prototype of a construction game.