calendario eventi  :: 

X

4/7/2003

Three exhibitions

Wiener Secession, Wien

MARY HEILMANN
All Tomorrow's Parties

Main Hall

Mary Heilmann's pictures assume a special position in the genre of abstract painting. Whereas autobiographical moments often provide a starting point for her works, the reduced forms and the choice of expressive color compositions frequently cite elements of the most diverse lifestyle and design cultures from the last decades. Styles are borrowed from abstract expressionism, Pop Art and geometric painting. The spaces of personal memory that flow into Mary Heilmann's work are alluded to with associative titles.

The exhibition at the Secession, which is dedicated to her recently deceased gallerists Pat Hearn and Colin de Land, comprises thirty works from the late seventies up to the present and shows paintings, ceramic pictures, and a series of specially designed wooden chairs with colorfully woven seats. In this combination of different practices, the artist indicates not only her own way of dealing with abstract painting, which goes beyond the analysis of a medium, but also to relation to sculpture.

Mary Heilmann, who studied ceramics and sculpture in Berkeley in the sixties, was soon in close contact with artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman and Keith Sonnier. It was in New York in the early seventies that she first began exploring and experimenting with materials and forms (of dematerialization) - contrary to a general trend more in the direction of minimalism - in the field of abstract painting.

The early works, in which Mary Heilmann primarily used acrylic on canvas, are dominated by lattice and grid structures, which she reinterprets from the basis of her interest in process-oriented sculptures, but also as a counterreaction to their traditionally defined prosaicness and austerity. In the treatment of the surface and space of the picture that is characteristic for the artist, her use of reductive painterly methods and an elementary geometrical vocabulary, visual and tactile picture conceptions interlock. With a striking sense of color, Heilmann weights circles, lines and squares in forceful contrasts. The corners and edges of the canvas are often integrated into the motifs. By frequently painting over the pictures, Heilmann disturbs the balance of the colors, but increases their intensity at the same time. Since the late eighties, Heilmann has used oil on canvas more and more and developed the superimposition of painterly planes into complex spatial structures. Her use of "shaped canvas" emphasizes the intention of opening up a dialogue with architecture.

Even though Mary Heilmann cites the formal language of the history of abstraction and minimalism in her works, the focus is not on the analysis of form and content, but rather on playing through these elements of style in order to go beyond their logic.

In addition to the integration of biographical moments, Mary Heilmann s works also have a close affinity to film and music, and literary writing. In the book The All Night Movie (1999), she tells her life story and describes the context in which her pictures are created and which they cite. The All Night Movie combines anecdotes from her private life with developments in her career, tells of art attitudes and thinking and changing perspectives in the art market.

PUBLICATION
The catalogue for the exhibition at the Secession continues this account. In addition to texts by Jennifer Higgie and Martin Prinzhorn, it also includes a text by Mary Heilmann about the history of Pat Hearn and Colin de Land and her relationship to them as gallerists and friends.

LECTURE
Lecture by Mary Heilmann at the Secession: September 7, 2003, 6.30 p.m.

MARY HEILMANN, born in 1940, lives and works in New York, Solo exhibitions (selection): 2003 Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin; 2002 American Fine Arts, New York; 2001 Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich; Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna; Camden Arts Centre, London; 2000 Oldenburger Kunstverein; Galleria Marabini, Bologna; 1998 Pat Hearn Gallery, New York; Group Exhibitions (selection): 2003 There's no land but the land (up there is just a sea of possibilities), Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe; 2001 Mary Heilmann - Joanne Greenbaum, Greengrassi Gallery, London; Künstlerräume/ Sammlerräume, Kunstverein St.Gallen; Part Two (1988-1994), Pat Hearn Gallery, New York; 2000 Mary Heilmann - Jessica Stockholder, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; The Artist as Curator, Galerie Nächst St.Stephan, Vienna; 1997 KünstlerInnen: 50 Positionen zeitgenössischer internationaler Kunst, Kunsthaus Bregenz
_________

MEL ZIEGLER
stuffed

Galerie, public space

Mel Ziegler has been one of the most consistent proponents of an expanded in-situ concept since the nineties. In his projects that are located in both exhibition spaces and urban spaces, he explores how the circumstances of public life and social space are reflected in the architecture and "design" of cities. At the same time, his work focuses on the question of the hidden historical and social-political manifestations of representation. In order to reveal and manipulate these, Mel Ziegler uses the most diverse materials to create complex reference systems, in which individual and collective history converge.

His project stuffed is situated not only in the Galerie of the Secession, but also in various places of business in the city center of Vienna. It examines the potentials of meaning inherent to display cases and showcases, as well as their different presentation contexts in museums, exhibition spaces and shopping zones, including the concomitant attributions of value and circumstances of ownership.

Mel Ziegler furnishes the exhibition rooms at the Secession with a number of Biedermeier showcases and cabinets from the Imperial Court Furniture Depot. The display furniture, which is now public property as part of a collection, is placed with the display side facing the wall, so that the cases reject their original function of presentation and become exhibition objects themselves.

Against the social history background of a general retreat to the private sphere, the home was the most important area of Biedermeier culture (1815-1848). The industrialization that arose during the Biedermeier era not only made an increase of private property possible for a broader segment of the population, but with the offers of (mass) goods instead of production on order, it also led to a changed culture of consumption, which still predominates today. For the bourgeoisie, which became increasingly prosperous after the Napoleonic Wars, yet was still kept at a distance from political influence, furniture provided a means of displaying one's property. Whereas the taste of the bourgeoisie was still oriented to that of the aristocracy, resulting in collections of mementos, porcelain, glass and other luxury goods, a countermovement of acquisition took place on the side of the imperial court: Biedermeier, which came into full bloom in Austria, is the only style of furnishing that was adopted by the aristocracy.

These parameters of the furniture's historical circumstances - the interlocking of property with private and public spaces of representation - are also the central point of reference for the second part of the project, which has been realized in the city center of Vienna, as indicated by both a wall text and the extensive online documentation.

Mel Ziegler has placed roughly fifty contemporary display cases from the stores of various museums of Vienna in numerous places of business in the Vienna city center (Kärnterstrasse, Graben and side streets). The basis for this translocation was Ziegler's observation that displays and showcases are not only an essential element of the language of museums and exhibition houses, but also feature significantly in the image of the city (center) and the shopping zone, especially in Vienna.

The museum display cases are integrated in shop windows and filled to the brim with straw. Showcases that are already there in the shops are filled with straw in the same way. The straw, which is golden, yet virtually worthless and strangely out of place with its rural connotations, questions the normativity of value attributions that go hand in hand with a presentation within the world of consumption and commodities. It hinders looking into the presentation space, where the products that are otherwise displayed are found, and it calls attention to the furniture itself in a way that is comparable with the display cases facing the wrong way in the Secession. At the border between advertising and exhibiting, the question remains open as to whether the display cases are commodity goods or art works. Mel Ziegler demonstrates the conjunctions and intersections of commodity and art presentation and thus negotiates the associated issues of originality, authenticity and distinction in the discussion of site-specific art.

PUBLICATION
A catalogue (German/English) will be published for the exhibition with a text by Hedwig Saxenhuber.

MEL ZIEGLER, born in 1956, lives and works in Austin; Solo exhibitions (selection): 2002 Without Time / Without Temperature, Fri-Art Kunsthalle, Freiburg; 2001 Doug Lawing Gallery, Houston; 2000 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; 1999 Artpace, San Antonio; 1998 Come and Go, Spaces, Cleveland; Growing Concern, Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal; 1997 Arts Club of Chicago; Group Exhibitions (selection): 2001 Basics, Kunsthalle Bern; Museum as Subject, Osaka National Museum; Mapping Art and Science, Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs; Loudly Minimal, Quietly Baroque, Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio; 2000 Museum as Muse, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Out of the Ordinary, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
__________

NORBERT BRUNNER
Im Spiegel der Psyche

Grafisches Kabinett

Sunday, 6 July 2003, 11 a.m.-12 noon, Im Spiegel der Psyche, Kunstradio Ö1 and Online Artradio

A characteristic element in Norbert Brunner's work is his confrontation with language. In his audio installations and experimental radio plays, but also in his drawings and literary-artistic texts, he deconstructs and transforms psychological, iconographic, mythological and fantastic elements and meanings. This results in complex analytical and simultaneously aesthetic-poetic language images, which reveal new fields of relationships between icon, index and symbol and grasp text as a material and medium that is malleable and performable in fine art.

In the Secession Norbert Brunner shows the project Im Spiegel der Psyche ("In the Mirror of the Psyche"), which conjoins a cycle of drawings and an experimental radio play. The text of the radio play forms the basis for the narratives in the drawings.
The focal point of the work is the psyche in an ambiguous sense. In addition to the meaning of the word for mental processes and intellectual functions, in Austria the word "Psyche" also refers to a dressing table with a mirror. What is shown in the mirror of the "Psyche" in Brunner's pictures is a bedroom with the furniture found in it, where the oppressive atmosphere evokes three central themes - fear, loneliness, and sexuality. An aura of the uncanny derives from the depiction of the furniture as protagonists of a sleepless situation fantastically awakened to life and paradoxically equipped, but also from the stories that are inscribed in the pieces of furniture or told by them.

Each of the pieces of furniture tells its own story - a shape of nocturnal waking with its absurd implications - charged with iconographic elements, banal word plays, or mythological references.
The hinges, corners and feet of the furniture are depicted as human extremities. The walls and furniture have hands and feet, the metronome an ear. All these details fulfill functions in the context that is addressed. The uniform blue and white striped depiction of the furniture reminds us that the room is actually dedicated to sleeping, but does not permit it; instead, the impressions and fears repressed in sleeplessness appear and arbitrarily recompose themselves. The blue and white strips are also reminiscent of pajamas worn by the artist, who has put himself into one of the drawings as a bedside rug. As a depiction of what is incomprehensible in the subconscious, the subject merges with the objects.

There is a bomb lying in bed, above it hangs a picture of the mountain range Rose Garden, in the Germanic saga of the kingdom of the dwarf king Laurin, exploding. A rubber tree peeps out of a cupboard, evoking the cliché of a deserted island. The artist himself is seen on the high seas wearing the foot of the bed on his head, whereby this subject alludes to themes from the Old Testament and its representations in the Romantic era. The two stories of origins from Christian religion, that of the crucifixion of Jesus and that of Adam and Eve, were often linked together, for instance with Jesus standing on the head of Adam.

The nightstand, furnished with a fleece and a valley, the child-like portrayal of the Emmen Valley, refers to the Greek saga of Jason and the Argonauts, but is naturally also a symbol of sexuality. Open, it shows the scene of a small boy blowing a trumpet, which was inspired by both a picture by Kippenberger and the book Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, and which also alludes to the first cry after birth with its literal "onomatopoeia". The lamp is a reference to Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna pictures and Sigmund Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, which is usually regarded as an exemplary case of a psychoanalytical interpretation of art works.

"In their elaborate constructedness and with their multiple revisions, they [the drawings] are exactly the opposite of casual drafts and delicate allusions. The psyche becomes a tormenting formation that, because it has neither beginning nor end, cannot really be represented, but only laboriously pressed into the space, only held together by the countless cross-references and holes leading to other levels." (Martin Prinzhorn)

In the Grafisches Kabinett, the hanging of the drawings and the positioning of the mirror as the central moment in the space take up the absurdity of the entire scene once again. In the staircase to the Grafisches Kabinett, the text based on the picture series can be heard as a sound installation. In cooperation with Kunstradio from the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, Norbert Brunner has composed a radio play for four voices (the number refers to the number of pieces of furniture in the imaginary room) from the text, which will be broadcast in Kunstradio (Sunday, 6 July 2003, 11 a.m.-12 noon, Im Spiegel der Psyche, Kunstradio Ö1 and Online Artradio).

PUBLICATION
A bilingual catalogue (German/English) will be published on the exhibition with an essay by Martin Prinzhorn and the text by Norbert Brunner In the Mirror of the Psyche (generated from the series Barefoot Sleeplessness).

NORBERT BRUNNER, born 1959, lives and works in Innsbruck and Vienna; solo exhibitions (selected): 2000 Dokumentarische Dialektstudie 1/2, with Michael Schuster, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; 1999 Dokumentarische Dialektstudie 1/2, with Michael Schuster, steirischer herbst, Graz; 1982 König Laurin und sein Rosengarten, Galerie Peter Pakesch, Vienna; group exhibitions (selected): 2002 Variable Stücke, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; 2001 Freiheit lebenslänglich, Galerie Hammele und Ahrens, Stuttgart; 2000 Re-Play. Anfänge internationaler Medienkunst in Österreich, Generali Foundation, Vienna; 1997 Alpenblick- Die zeitgenössische Kunst und das Alpine, Kunsthalle Vienna

Image: Norbert Brunner, Im Spiegel der Psyche, 2002

Wiener Secession, Association of Visual Artists
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34

stampa

permanent link