Franz Graf
dal 5/7/2011 al 27/8/2011
Segnalato da
5/7/2011
Franz Graf
Bawag Contemporary, Wien
Mein interesse. Graf, the botanist, anatomist, and poete maudit, assembles his formats: subtle ink and graphite drawings, photography, white and black canvases, sculpture for which he recycles his inexhaustible hoard of everyday objects. Language. Text as an explanatory motif, as poetry, and open matter. Unpolished and often unfinished, his work remains promising and boundless.
Forever Young – there is nobody to whom this applies as much as it does to Franz Graf,
provided that idealism and sincerity are the relevant criteria, like in the song by
Bob Dylan.
After a major retrospective in the Kunsthalle Krems and hardships like receiving
the Austrian Art Prize, the time seems ripe again for some free style. There are not
many places in Vienna that would suit the artist’s energies and method better than the
transparent, swinging rooms of the BAWAG Contemporary venue. Graf will spontaneously arrange his compositions of pictures, sculptures, photographs, and drawings in
the gallery’s ups and downs, along its overwhelming vista, under the tiled ceiling and the
glass roof of its inner courtyard. Relying on his system of freely combining, interlinking
and overlapping diverse elements, he suspends the boundaries of space and of what a
work is usually about. Franz Graf, the botanist, anatomist, and poète maudit, assembles
his formats: subtle ink and graphite drawings, photography, white and black canvases,
sculpture for which he recycles his inexhaustible hoard of everyday objects. Language.
Text as an explanatory motif, as poetry, and open matter. Language that carries content,
shrouds content, and, as a graphic element, may be pure form independent of this very
content. Gloomy, often apocalyptic installations.
Franz Graf lives in the Waldviertel these days, in that part of the region where
scattered farms are grouped within ämter (departments). His living conditions, his
friends, and his studios, bursting at the seams, have always impregnated his work: it is
the scanty, austere and sparse tenor of the country near Gföhl which rubs itself into the
surfaces at the moment. Graf will transfer set pieces of his present environs in the
Waldviertel to Vienna. He will, on site, scratch a drawing into a window front painted
black for a past exhibition. Franz Graf will also present a group of new works concerned with the continuously recurrent subjects of the body and corporeality. Figuration and ornament are employed for creating an ambivalent, yet probing scenario in a variety of Accompanying events nuances where chance and regularity, order and chaos collide.
Both ambiguous and manifold, Franz Graf’s work never reveals itself at first
sight. The coarse unevenness of his craft, of his work, leaves everything open.
Unpolished and often unfinished, his work remains promising and boundless.
(Brigitte Huck)
Accompanying Program:
August 28, 2011, 9 p.m.
Concert Franz Graf and Guests
Artistic director: Christine Kintisch
Curator: Brigitte Huck
Image: © O.O. Bild in Originalgröße öffnen
Press relations:
Mag. Christina Werner w.hoch.2wei. Kulturelles Projektmanagement T 43/1/ 524 96 46-22 F 43/1/ 524 96 32 werner@kunstnet.at
Opening: Wednesday, July 6, 2011, 7 p.m.
Press preview: Wednesday, July 6, 2011, 10:30 a.m.
BAWAG Contemporary
Franz-Josefs-Kai 3 A - 1010 Vienna
open daily from 2 to 8 p.m.
Guided tours each Thursday at 6 p.m.
Admission free