calendario eventi  :: 

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18/2/2009

Three exhibitions

Wiener Secession, Wien

Katrin Plavčak - Human or Other

The predominant subject of the exhibition Human or Other by Katrin Plavčak in the main room of the Secession is the conquest of new spaces and the concomitant conceptions and fantasies of the other. The specially developed works include, in addition to numerous painted pictures, a series of moving objects, an outdoor work, and the video No New Colonies in cooperation with Johanna Kirsch, a music clip for the two artists’ song of the same name.

Contrary to the presumptions inherent in painting and its history in the twentieth century, often claimed to have ended, Katrin Plavčak works towards removing the boundaries of the medium. On the one hand she keeps painting open towards the mediatised environment, on the other she develops space-dominating pictorial concepts by means of juxtaposition and contrast, increasingly expanding painting into the realm of sculpture.

Katrin Plavčak stages her works at the Secession to create an ensemble that combines the colonisation of foreign countries, science-fiction space travel, human and extraterrestrial elements to create new narratives. The centrally positioned helium balloon, for example, is a reference to the pioneer of space travel Joe Kittinger, who ascended to a height of 35km in a balloon in 1960, returning to the ground in a free fall, while the steel-tube sculptures entitled Dreibeinige Herrscher / The Tripods go back to the figure of machines brought to life in the 1980’s science-fiction television series. In the painted pictures she combines a number of political allusions with the fantastic metaphors of modern-day chimeras and hybrid technology. Others are covered with abstract blinds, grids and webbed structures that prevent the accustomed, visual appropriation and require the viewer to redefine his position.

The tour in the Secession kicks off with an outdoor work on the façade: Plavčak puts a giant moustache on the building. An emblem of male power and a comedic accessory at one and the same time, the moustache – in the form of a quick and simple scribble on posters – is also one of the “primal interventions in the public space” (KP).

Katrin Plavčak’s images are characterised by a play of the inevitability of associations. In a free process, she transforms collected media finds and observations, combining them with her own inventions, distorting and remixing them. Characteristic of her depictions is an effect between realism and abstraction, vision and banality, fantasy and caricature.


Katrin Plavčak (b. in 1970 in Gütersloh) lives and works in Berlin and Vienna.

Catalogue
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue (German/English) with an essay by Jutta Koether.

Solo shows (selection)
2009 Human or Other, Secession, Vienna; Fallen Fliegen, museum32, Berlin; Linke Hand und Rechte Hand, with Roland Seidel, after the butcher, Berlin; 2007 a distant evidence of form, fuorizona artecontemporanea, Macerata; postmoskau. Kosmos und Architektur, Cafe Moskau, Berlin; Pokrocila nejistota / Fortgeschrittene Unsicherheit, Galerie des Österreichischen Kulturforums, Prague; For the Birds, Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna; Noise: Von der Kunst der Malerei, Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna; 2006 geheimes Leben, Stadtgalerie Schwaz, Schwaz.

Group shows (selection)
2008 along with all these mental rotations, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck; as bring collective, passagegalerie, Künstlerhaus, Vienna; 2007 The sound of silence, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; wann immer vorerst, BA-CA Kunstforum, Vienna; No sound of silence, Salzburger Kunstverein; Fresh Trips, Kunstraum Innsbruck; PASSION FOR ART, Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg; 2006 Frammenti Di Prospettive / Brüchige Perspektiven, centro per'larte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; 2005 Austrian Contemporary Art and Postwar Painting – Collection Essl, Museo de Arte Moderna, Mexico City, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey; Section des Tableaux, Maes & Matthys Gallery, Antwerp; Irreal, Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg; Slices of Life – Blueprints of the Self in Painting, Austrian Cultural Forum New York.

The exhibitions are realized through support of:
Erste Bank – Partner of the Secession
Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Wien Kultur
Friends of the Secession

The exhibition Katrin Plavčak is sponsored by Arbeiterkammer Wien.

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Klaus Mosettig - Pradolux

The Vienna-based artist Klaus Mosettig is presenting a selection of recent drawings in the Secession’s Gallery. Mosettig conceives his works in groups that, while differing in terms of subject matter and appearance, are based upon a consistent basic attitude. The Apollo 11 series goes back to a sequence of slides that Mosettig found at a flea market. The pictures are close-ups of the surface of the moon taken in the course of the first moon landing in 1969. Klaus Mosettig is not interested in the historical dimension but rather in the abstract nature of documentary images that cannot be interpreted unequivocally without context. The motif is not the moon but rather actual slides and their projection, meticulously transferred onto the paper base. Projection as a common device in current image production is as much a topic as the gesture of artistic representation in general in the traditional medium of drawing. In Mosettig’s work, the drawing consists throughout of hatchings of constant direction and density. What appears immaterial from a distance turns out on closer inspection to be a field of painstaking manual processing that emancipates itself from the events depicted.

Similarly, Mosettig picks up on paintings by Jackson Pollock. His version of the large-format Number 32 from 1950 (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf) has the same dimensions as the original and was also created on the basis of a slide projection. The media transformations turn Pollock’s dynamically cast streaks of paint into a nervous, jittery web. Pollock’s pictures rank equal alongside other visual source material, but, being art, provide the additional opportunity of taking an ironical angle on stale, but long-lived categories of viewing art (authenticity of the painterly gesture, authority of the visionary artist subject) by means of grotesque inversion. Another important aspect in this context is the horizontal presentation of Mosettig’s work, that upsets the concept of drip paintings that, while produced on the ground, are traditionally hung on the wall. Finally, Mosettig’s fifteen-fold graphic repetition of an ink drawing by Pollock puts the idea of the unique original and the practice of art-market reproduction into an inextricable tension by fusing both into a paradoxical whole.

The title of the exhibition Pradolux, finally, derives from a third complex of works. The subtlest marks, that make the sheets look like negative images of a starry sky, are nothing but dirt on the lens of a slide projector, that Mosettig focused on in the truest sense. Once again, we see a consistent aspect of Mosettig’s art: The painstaking “objectivity” of random structures in fact fails to provide any gain in knowledge about the object, but pressurises borderlines and destabilises orientations.

Solo shows (selection)
2009 Pradolux, Secession, Wien; 2007 Daily Output, Österreichisches Kulturforum Tokyo; Organisch III, Haaaauch, Klagenfurt, with Tatiana Lecomte; 2006 Niemals Genuss ohne Bitterkeit, Minoritengalerien, Graz; processual minimalism, 4/4 kunst bei wittmann, Wien; Holzplastik, Neue Galerie Studio, Graz; 2003 Die Übergänge sind beim leidenschaftlichen Gleichgewicht, was die Dübel und Verzapfungen bei einem Fachwerk sind – Bestandsaufnahme II, Galerie Martin Janda, Wien; Galerie Zell am See, with Tatiana Lecomte.

Group shows (selection)
2008 Flora, Galerie Museum, Bozen; Hommage an die Zeichnung, Parlament, Wien; 2007 Gartenarchivierung, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Atelier Augarten, Wien; 2006 Genuine Happiness, Kunstbüro, Wien; 2005 Wisdom of Nature – Eight Visions from Austria, Nagoya City Art Museum; 2004 Artothek eMuseum. Ankäufe 2003/2004, Kunstraum Palais Porcia, Wien; 2003 Why is everything the same?, Galerie Martin Janda, Wien; Auge:Experiment, Kärntner Landesgalerie, Klagenfurt; 1999 come together, Portfolio Kunst AG, Wien; Der ironische Blick, Museum auf Abruf, Wien; Diversities, spices, academists, Semperdepot, Wien; Öffentliche Erscheinungen, Raum für Kunst, Graz; 1994 Kunst auf Zeit, Graz

The exhibitions are realized through support of:
Erste Bank – Partner of the Secession
Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Wien Kultur
Friends of the Secession

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Hannes Zebedin - Mit Schwung durchqueren anstatt sich aufzuhalten

Hannes Zebedin’s exhibition Mit Schwung durchqueren anstatt sich aufzuhalten at the Secession’s Grafisches Kabinett focuses on the white cube as a model of the (hermetic) art space and how it may be overcome by reality’s “invasion” of this world of art. His exhibition consists of two situations that are, on the one hand, stand-alone. On the other hand, the opposed movement of the three-dimensional transformations create a dialectics between establishing a completed format and its destruction.

By means of an installation placed by the artist, the staircase leading up to the Grafisches Kabinett, a functional zone that precedes the actual exhibition room, is devoid of functional or decorative details and is illuminated in glaring white. On the walls of this minimalistically clear space we read – at least fragmentarily – the quotation of the Italian futurist Aldo Palazzeschi that Zebedin uses as a motto and title for his installation: “Instead of dwelling in the darkness of pain, we want to cross it boldly so as to enter the light of laughter.”

While the staircase cites the white cube, the actual exhibition room resembles a place badly damaged by vandalism or protest as a result of the artist’s activist stone-throwing: The windows are smashed and pieces of broken glass and cobblestones lie scattered through the room. The outside, the noise from the street, the temperature, etc. can be experienced unfiltered, the lighting situation in the room is dependent on the outside light. The references that Hannes Zebedin opens up to other artistic positions and drafts of society are many and diverse: They range from the futurists – who, as we know, propagated the assimilation of the individual in the masses – to Franz Kafka, whose existentialist writings focus on precisely this individual; but they also include Gordon Matta-Clark, whose “Window Blow-Out” is cited here in an inverted form, and Bruce Nauman with his “Performance Corridor”.

It is characteristic of Hannes Zebedin’s pointedly staged installations, interventions and performances that he explores the possibilities of individual articulation in view of other developments focused by group dynamics in civil society. The stone thrown through the windows of the Grafisches Kabinett cites the aesthetic of a political act and, at the same time, questions how it relates to the convention of the reality-effacing white cube in particular and the world of art in general. In his contemporary interpretation of the manifesto format he tries to find possibilities of finding a clear position of a political or artistic attitude that forms a contrast to the post-modern approach of “anything goes”.

Catalogue
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue (German/English) with an essay by Kit Hammonds.

Solo shows and interventions
2009 Mit Schwung durchqueren anstatt sich aufzuhalten, Secession, Vienna; 2007 Ein Sonntag im Museum (with Adrien Tirtiaux), Baumgasse 30a, Vienna; 2006 Lyudmila und Kalinka, public space, Tromsö, Norway; 2005 Marcus Omofuma Stein, public space, Vienna; 2004 3sprachig50%, Republiksplatz, Belgrade.

Group shows (selection)
2009 Spotlight. Neuzugänge seit 2006, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg(*); Bürger/in Bosnien und Herzegowinas, Klub Ost, Vienna; 2008 Am Rande Pathetik, Fluc, Vienna; Kleinstes Gemeinsames Vielfaches, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; Backstage Tourism, Gemäldegalerie, Academy of Fine Arts
Vienna; Archive in residence, UNA Gallery, Bucharest; 2007 Frisch vom Friseur auf der Suche nach der Modernen, Kurzbauergasse 8, Vienna; Kaffee
und Drina, Vereinigung Bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs, Vienna; Ausgesetzt_spaesato, Galleria Lungomare, Bozen; 2006 God is a gallery, Galuzin Gallery, Oslo; Gallery of the HfBK Hamburg; All night long, Christine König Galerie, Vienna (*); Verk, Forsbakka, Schweden; Spektrum Farbe, Landesmuseum Niederösterreich, St. Pölten (*); Give me five, Tanzquartier Wien (*); 2005 Medialisierung, Spatialisierung, (Re)Politisierung, Arbeit, Fluc, Vienna; 4 a different view, Cafe Rot, Vienna; Rückverortung des Sozialen, VBKÖ, Vienna; Mundpropaganda, Amthof, Feldkirchen; 2004 Real Presence 04, Museum des 25. Mai, Belgrade.
(*) with Markus Gradner, Daniel Ramirez, Stephan Uggowitzer

The exhibitions are realized through support of:
Erste Bank – Partner of the Secession
Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Wien Kultur
Friends of the Secession

Image: Hannes Zebedin, Present Perfect, 2004, Installation

For further information and photographic material please contact:
Kathrin Schweizer Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34 presse@secession.at

Opening Thursday, February 19, 2009, 7 p.m.

Wiener Secession
Friedrichstrasse 12 - Wien
Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Thursday 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Easter Monday, April 13, 2009, open from 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.

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