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5/12/2001

Oyvind Fahlstrom

Bawag Foundation (old location), Wien

The Complete Graphics, Multiples and Sound Works

The exhibition will present the cosmopolitan artist Öyvind Fahlström's (1928 - 1976) entire graphic oeuvre as well as a number of multiples dating from between 1954 and 1976 in Austria for the first time.

The show also includes his early work Manifesto for Concrete Poetry from 1953.

In the basement, visitors will be introduced to samples of Fahlström's radio poetry, such as the "tape-event" Birds in Sweden (1963), a collage of concrete poetry, new mammoth languages and pieces of music.

The exhibition also provides an opportunity to get to know a number of other crucial works from the artist's silkscreen print frieze Opera (1953) to his multiple Masses (1976).

In recent years, Öyvind Fahlström's work has received more and more international acclaim.
The artist is regarded as a pioneer of interactive multimedia art, and his oeuvre is seen as an integral part of his political activism and his fight for social justice.
Fahlström employed a wide range of media, created new "variable" picture forms, anticipating today's enthusiasm of the art world for interactive approaches by more than twenty years.

He combined concrete poetry, concept art, and pop art in a singular manner and has thus become one of the most important artists for the younger generation.
Emphasizing the complexity of Fahlström's work and its relevance to the present, the 1997 documenta referred to him as one of the crucial sources regarding the preparation of the exhibition.

Öyvind Fahlström's oeuvre shares the sixties' Utopian outlook concerning an opening of the borders between the avant-garde and popular cultures.
Playfully offering alternative models, the artist aimed at creating a different world.

Born as the son of Scandinavian parents in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1928, Öyvind Fahlström studied archaeology and art history in Stockholm, found artistic inspiration on his journeys to Italy and during his extensive stays in Paris, becoming acquainted with the contemporary French culture through surrealism (Artaud, Michaux). He dedicated himself to the study of pre-Columbian Mexican manuscripts and, besides his Manifesto for Concrete Poetry, wrote a number of poems and art critiques.

Even visual art was a linguistic activity for him.
As for painting, he was primarily interested in the space it offered for concretized words which he then translated into rhythmic forms.

His early work Opera (1953) seems to result from his interest in pre-Columbian Mexican illuminated manuscripts and the art of Japanese scroll paintings or makemono.
The space-spanning visual score of its layout forces the viewer to follow the horizontal movement.
The impression is similar to the one created by a film or a piece of music the flow of which cannot be stopped. Fahlström considered this work as an "experimental canvas for various methods, ideas, and means."

In 1961, he began to draw on the visual languages of popular culture, especially the language of underground comics, in the USA - an approach which provided him with new narrative and discursive structures.
In New York, he worked in the studio formerly occupied by Robert Rauschenberg and situated in the same building that Jasper Johns lived in.
His first variable painting, Sitting ... six months later, dates from 1962.
The objective of a democratization of art he pursued with such pictures finally made him assemble his works like puzzles, keeping them variable by means of magnets, and allowing their owners to change them according to their own ideas.

Fahlström's oeuvre is characterized by a simultaneousness of different styles and techniques.
He increasingly integrated media such as radio, film and theater into his work.

In the seventies, the poet-painter gradually turned into a poet-geographer.
More and more handwritten annotations overgrow the cartographic sceneries of these years.
Upset about the political events of his epoch - especially in South America - and US interventionist politics in the countries of the Third World, Fahlström began to systematically work with data and information on financial and political processes.
His visual alphabet made him reinvent the figurative art of medieval map making.

Graphic art played a very particular role for him.
In the early 1950s, Öyvind Fahlström had already been worried that works of art might turn into fetishes and warned of the seductiveness of originals in an age of mass production.
He believed that artists rather ought to produce mass editions and rely on negatives as the basis for innumerable inexpensive unsigned works.
Fahlström regarded his variable play pictures as prototypes for such mass editions; he was convinced that their real effect would only become apparent when produced in large numbers and sold at reasonable prices so that everybody interested would be able to get a copy and play with it.

Curator Sharon Avery-Fahlström and Dr. Harald Falckenberg will introduce the artist's work at the opening of the exhibition.

Opening 6 December 2001, 6.00 p.m.

Opening hours daily 10.00 a.m. - 6.00 p.m.
closed on 24, 25 and 26 December 2001,
31 December 2001 and 1 January 2002

Free admission

Guided tours Saturdays and Sundays on 3.00 p.m.

Curator Sharon Avery-Fahlström
Project management Christine Kintisch
Assistance Gabriela Gutmann
Technical coordination Werkstätte Zwölfergasse
Organization BAWAG Foundation

Press relations Christina Werner,
phone: ++43/1/524 96 46-22
fax: ++43/1/524 96 32
e-mail: werner@kunstnet.at

BAWAG FOUNDATION
Tuchlauben 7a, A-1010 Vienna
phone: ++43/1/534 53-226 55
fax: ++43/1/534 53-230 96

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