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16/11/2006

Emerging artists 06

Essl Museum Contemporary Art, Klosterneuburg

Swizerland

The exhibition series emerging artists offers local and international artists who are not yet established on the art market a platform for presenting their work in a museum context. In 2006 The Essl Collection presents a neighbouring country, Switzerland, whose "young" scene is little known in Austria. The curators appreciated this as an opportunity to discover Swiss emerging artists. From more than 500 entries, the curators chose a shortlist of 40 artists who they went to see in their studios in Switzerland.

The selection criteria were originality, freshness, consistency in the choice of themes, media and techniques, and theoretical background. Of course, personal likes and preferences of the curators were necessarily involved in this process which can never be truly "objective". The exhibition at The Essl Collection presents 18 artists with 240 works. Every position needed to be given enough space to give visitors a real impression of the individual artistic approaches.

Human beings in artificial worlds, such as the circus, the theatre, film or a natural science museum is a central theme of Tatiana Arce. Her characteristic poetic approach links Arce’s works that are executed in the most diverse media.

Lukas Beyeler’s preferred media are video and photography. His work centres on the phenomena of the entertainment culture. A central theme is the issue of identity, both when he focuses on Switzerland and in his exploration of the myth of the star cult.

Patricia Bucher follows a very consistent conceptual approach with an analytical and distanced take on reality. An issue that all of the works selected for The Essl Collection have in common is an inquiry into the information content offered by the mass media.

In his photographs and installations, Stefan Burger explores the fundamental significance of photography and the conditions under which images are created. The presentation of photographic work spans a range from the over-aestheticised way of presenting goods in advertising to the archaic, rough presentation on wooden planks.

Claudette Ebnoether develops her very consistent body of work removed from current trends and discussions. Every day, almost following a ritual, she works on large-format drawings. A performance approach can be seen in the photo series Transfer which impresses by its elemental power.

Sonja Feldmeier manages to translate political and social themes into powerful and memorable images. Neverending, for instance, is an installation that gives rise to an imaginary, endless skyscraper of life. The doors of a freight lift open and close and reveal little segments of day-to-day urban life.

Christian Gonzenbach: Pets and daily food such as gherkins or cornflakes are taken out of their context by changing their scale and environment and are then used to discuss fundamental philosophical questions.

In one video, he has gherkins look at their own species in display cases like human museum visitors or turns a rabbit into a monster by super-sizing it (length: 4 m). Sylvia Hostettler very consistently develops her sculptural work in experiments. Her objects, partly large-format and softly luminous, deal with the beauty of nature.

Her chosen material is soft malleable wax. Despite her rather conservative artistic approach, the artist manages to create something novel and unprecedented. The large-format nail pictures by Monica Ursina Jager are a synthesis of photography, painting and a three-dimensional element. The artist finds her themes, which she translates into graphic structures and lines, in existing photographs. For Jager, nature turns into a projection screen for the fears and desires of human beings.

The objects created by Anastasia Katsidis look at once robust and fragile and invite the viewer to use them without revealing their function at first glance. To create them the artist combines used parts, such as seats from trains or toys, and self-built items. The pieces impress by the deliberate choice of materials and the precise surface treatment.

In 1997, the Basle-based artist Barbarella Maier started to develop 1997 EASY-ART paper objects, which are created on the basis of photographs she took herself. The photographs are enlarged in a grid format and copied. The artist fills them with wadding and thus creates 3D objects that can be up to 12 metres long.

In the time leading up to the exhibition, in late September, Maier did a public-space intervention in Vienna and in Klosterneuburg. She marked both cities with some 200 EASY ART urinals which were accompanied by small pieces of paper that explained the idea.

The expressive video work (peinture anime'e) of Alexandra Maurer is stirring and confronts the viewer with existential questions. In her painstakingly prepared projects she creates a synthesis of painting, dance performance and video. The luminous colours, the expressive brushstroke, the deliberate non- painting of certain points in the film and the poignant editing rhythm lend great dramatic power to her work.

The photographer Irina Polin uses stray objects, day-to-day banal things such as toys, dolls’ houses and fashion accessories. Initially cute and small, the objects grow in size. Through their combination with other objects they lose their insignificance and are partly charged with erotic (or even sadomasochistic) content. Christian Ratti often works in the public sphere. By making small, almost unnoticeable interventions he illustrates how little attention and critical doubt we devote to the details of our environment. There is a characteristic stringency and consistency in his artistic and philosophical approach which is not so much determined by the production of objects for the art market as by reflecting on perception.

Herbert Weber does not consider his photographs to be something staged or a performance, even if they are reminiscent of both. In every photograph the artist visibly reacts to his environment and instils it with individual meaning. How do I perceive nature? How do I react to it? These are the central issues in his work.

Catalogue: German and English. 144 pages with numerous color images.
With articles by Prof. Karlheinz Essl, Simone Schardt, Christian Ratti, Daniela Balogh und Andreas Hoffer.
Also containing biographies of all 18 artists.
Edition Sammlung Essl Privatstiftung: Klosterneuburg 2006
€ 23,00 (Order by E-Mail)

Exhibition Period: 17 November 2006 until 25 February 2007

Guided Tours: Saturday, 5 p.m

Sammlung Essl
An der Donau - Au 1 Klosterneuburg Austria
Opening hours: Tue - Sun: 10.00 - 19.00 Wed: 10.00 - 21.00 / Free Admission 19.00 - 21.00 Mon: closed
Admission: euro 7/5/2

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