calendario eventi  :: 

X

27/5/2012

Simon Starling and Superflex

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary - TBA21 Augarten, Wien

Curated by Daniela Zyman and Eva Wilson

Turner Prize winner Simon Starling (born 1967) has been invited to work in collaboration with the Danish artists group Superflex to inaugurate and unfold the new Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary exhibition space at Augarten—a striking modern pavilion structure completed in 1957 as an artists' workshop—with a presentation of works from the TBA21 collection and several new projects developed for Vienna. Reprototypes, Triangulations and Road Tests conflates seven seminal works by Simon Starling and Superflex in a dialogical setting—among them Exposition (2004); Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolation and Bifurcations (2007–8); D1 - Z1 (22,686,575:1) (2009); Black Out (2009); and Kuh (2012).

These works "collapse" as unstable complexes around pertinent themes and present us with an exhibition that proposes triangulated speculations articulated by undisciplined objects, piercing through the layers of time and history and revisiting long-held certainties. Posited as reprototypes, they reveal various strategies for siting the contemporary within the modern, resuscitating objects and innovations out of obsolescence, testing their contemporary vitality and thus disrupting the self-sufficiency of the modernist canon. To that effect, Starling and Superflex transform the Augarten back into a workshop, reactivating the spaces and the garden, giving rise to strange alignments and unexpected presences. A set of blackout lamps, designed in 1942 by Poul Henningsen for the Tivoli amusement park in Copenhagen as liminal illumination during wartime, span the entire space in regular intervals but at a slightly disorienting angle. An elegant winglike and "light-hungry" Shed roof, originally designed by Jean Prouvé in 1952, is mounted on a truck, playing out an almost parodic relationship to the vast north-facing windows of the studios. This work, Prouvé (Road Test) (2012), will have performed a test drive on the runway of an airfield, road-testing the aspirational, aerodynamic exoskeleton.

The story of the sculptor Gustinus Ambrosi, the infamous commissioner of the Augarten studios, has been retraced on the occasion of TBA21s inaugural exhibition. Ambrosi's passionate affection for a Tyrolean cow (named the "Queen"), which he handpicked as a model for a sculpture for the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin in 1942 and the close encounter between the contemporary use of the space and the reemergence of archival material illuminating Ambrosi's role as an artist of the Third Reich is at the core of Kuh, a new project by Superflex. Two descendants of the "Queen" have been located in Tyrol and invited to graze—at least for the time being—in the Augarten. The cow is the portal to the past, and the doors have been reopened.

Catalogue: "Simon Starling / Superflex. Reprototypes, Triangulations and Road Tests". Edited by Daniela Zyman and Eva Wilson
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. With essays by Esther da Costa Meyer, Robin Mackay, Venugopal Maddipati, Mirjam Schaub, Birgit Schneider. 144 pages. Language: English. Graphic design: Sara Hartman, John McCusker
ISBN: 978-3-943365-23-8
Price: €29.00
Sponsored by Wiener Städtische Versicherungsverein

Image: Truck, Jean Prouvé ‘Shed’ roof section c. 1950; c. 821 x 371 x 332 cm. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin

Opening May 29, 2012, 7pm

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary - Atelier Augarten
Scherzergasse 1A, Wien
Mon-Thu, Sat-Sun 11am to 7pm, Fri 11am to 10 pm
Admission: General: EUR 5, Students and Seniors: EUR 3, Free for children under 18

stampa

permanent link