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English summaires January 12 - 25
Camera Austria
Erik van der Wijde Gebilde
06.12.2014 – 15.02.2105
by Bettina Landl
Maria Lucia has sat down in a garden chair, obviously exhausted and crossed her right leg over the left one, one arm on the armrest, the other on the table over which a flowered cloth has been spread. She holds a cigarette in one hand, a glass in the other. Her toe and fingernails are painted. She is wearing ear-rings and a cocktail dress with black strapped shoes which are only there so she doesn't have to put her feet on the grass. Surrounded by a soft sadness, she has directed her gaze to the ground. The perm, the lipstick and her made-up eyes lend an unpretentious elegance to the scenery.
The other photographs in this series show her in homely ambience, at work and with a man. Relentlessly, these pictures impart an intimate insight into the private sphere of a stranger. The documentation creates wistfulness, shows the stimulus of the mundane and, at the same time, exemplifies its absurdity.
The exhibition display creates a room filling wood construction, resembles rows of pages from books on a table and presents a selection of Erik van der Weijde's works.
Contrasts dominate the production. Black-and-white photos are broken up by coloured one, as shown in the Senate, Brasilia series, eight photographs of the house of congress in Brasilia built by Oskar Niemeyer and the series Praia photographs from partly naked women whose bodies, additionally emphasize the object character. Depictions of the faces were foregone in order to protect the anonymity of the prostitutes who work on Brazil's beaches.
Erik van der Weijde's artistic interest is directed at the phenomena of the mundane whose dramatics, caught by the camera, appear to be revealed in a jiffy. On the other hand, the series This is not my Son plays with the role of the photographer and his model, scrutinizes the verisimilitude of pictures and their power to deceive. His first series, Groene Hilledijk, is composed of several photographs and shows a street in Rotterdam where the bizarre and the come to light during nightly walks.
Erik van der Weijde describes his work as a continual dialogue between inside and outside, the private and the public, the past and the future. The camera serves him as a tool for picture stories. Through his methods, the subjects demand a form of "importance" for themselves and the ostensible banal, seemingly meaningless aspects of the mundane are helped to more visibility through the formal stringent work. In the interests of an "Apothesis of the mundane", a beauty is manifested which only the camera is able to reveal.
Camera Austria
8020 Graz, Kunsthaus Graz, Lendkai 1
Tel: +43(0) 316/ 81 555 00
Fax: +43(0) 316/ 81 555 09
email: office@camera-austria.at
www.camera-austria.at
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
German Pop
06.11.2014 – 08.02.2015
by Daniela Gregori
"QUIBB art is not a German version of Pop Art, New Vulgarism, Junk Culture, Nouveau-Réalisme or Neo-Dada", say the first of 15 points confidently of the first QUIBB Manifesto, signed by HP Alvermann and Winfried Gaul in Düsseldorf on 30 January 1963. At that time, at the latest, that from which one wanted to distance oneself, arrived in Germany. Several months later, it sounded much more positive from the point of view of a conception: "Live with Pop – a demonstration for capitalist realism" was the title of the, meanwhile legendary, exhibition in a Düsseldorf furniture store with no one less as their protagonists than Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, later known as gallery owner Konrad Fischer. "German Pop" is the title of an exhibition in the Frankfurt's Schirn now focussing on the Pop phenomenon in Germany.
Of course the roots of Pop Art are to be found in England, but what was fascinating was the type of playing which washed over here from the USA, the penchant for consumer culture, for mass media, the levelling of the significance between high and low. Differences are all too apparent, its finally societal aspects which stand here in the foreground. "This glamorous celebration of the surface would not have been possible so shortly after the war", opines the curator of the exhibition, Martina Weinhart, in a discussion, but one has to remember that it concerned the first realistic art movement in Germany after the war. In the western world, avantgarde means abstractness, now, a younger generation of artists deals with urgent themes like coming to terms with the past or, as it were an actual theme, the Vietnam war with the definite gestures of Pop.
Düsseldorf, Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich mark the centres, within the cartography of the German Pop, the surrounding terrain appears to be a white field, a circumstance that also astonished the curator. Admittedly, there is active communication between these locations within the axis Düsseldorf –Berlin. As of the 60's, the Rheinland took a certain pioneer position in the area of art, in Düsseldorf, works ranged between being classic to experimental. In west Berlin, the producer gallery "Großgörschen 36" was founded for the purpose of self-help, and additionally, the young gallery owner, René Block, took a mediating role and in the following decade then in New York. In Munich, artists from groups such as "Geflecht", "Spur" or "Wir" combined informal quotes with those of Pop, an individualism which could hardly win through. And lastly, in Frankfurt, the most Americanized of the German cities, Thomas Bayrle and Peter Roehr stand out.
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
60311 Frankfurt am Main, Römerberg
email: welcome@schirn.de
www.schirn.de
Opening hours: Tue - Sun 11.00-19.00 hours, Wed - Sat 11.00-22.00 hours
Hofstätter projects
Maurizio Nannucci
15.10.2014 – 28.02.2015
by Nina Schedlmayer
The presentation of contemporaries in the museums for ancient art is booming. Not always to mutual advantage – there is the frequent danger that bare banality will emerge. However, when someone like Ed Ruscha grapples with objects in the Art and Kunst- und Wunderkammer in the Kunsthistorische Museumt (Museum of Fine Arts) , when Pae White re-arranges toys from the MAK collection, then one sees: it can also succeed.
Anton Hofstätter, son of the art dealer Reinhold Hofstätter who died in 2013, also had as similar and singular idea last spring. Besides being an art dealers in Vienna's inner city, the latter owned an apparently multitudinous collection of works of art, arts-and-crafts objects and other artefacts that were taken over by Anton after Reinhold's death. Now this artist is inviting us to address them; currently, it is Edelbert Köb, former MUMOK director, who is responsible for curating the exhibition, the gallery room in the Dorotheergasse was Hofstätter's first premises.
That Köb invited Maurizio Nannucci for the first show turned out to be relevant on two accounts. Firstly, the neon signs emphasize the architecture with its high rooms, with their partially surprising insights; secondly, his sentence "all art has been contemporary" can be viewed as a paradigm for such crossover projects. But even that lettering is missing in the exhibition; Nannucci often utilizes it and preferred to think up something new. Other lines of text such as "No single object is innocent" appear at first to echo just such obvious wisdoms; first, the exhibition room, and particularly this one here, charges itself with meaning. For his installation, Nannucci additionally chooses furniture from the era of the Wiener Moderne and arranges it in geometric figures which form printed characters: chairs form a circle, chandeliers are in a line, tables are scattered in squares or triangles. And as further references to the time – and the recent past – loose texts by Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein or Friedrich Achleitner.
Hofstätter Projekte
1010 Vienna, Dorotheergasse 14
Tel: +43 1 890 18 68
email: office@hofstaetter-projekte.com
www.hofstaetter-projekte.com
Opening hours: Tue - Fri 11-18 hours, Sat 10-13 hours
Georg Kargl Box
Schneesalon
16.01.2015 – 07.03. 2015
by Susanne Rohringer
In the New Year, Georg Kargl is showing the "Snow Salon" (Schneesalon) in his box, a subtle artistic homage to the theme of snow.
The gallerist begins his presentation with a photograph by the Czech artist, Jitka Hanzlova, who is presently represented in a solo exhibition in the Galerie Kargl. A landscape photograph with a high horizon of Hanzlova is to be seen In the Snow Salon. Shrubbery and blades of grass protrude from the blanket of snow. The landscape melts into the sky beyond recognition in a diffuse, white-blue light. This white dazzle, particularly dreaded on ski tours, can also be seen during January in the Mediterranean, where the sfumato line of the sea's horizon and the heavens is described as "Carta Bianca".
The landscape painter, Friedrich Beck, works with a similarly high horizon; in 1903, in one of his own styles, he painted a winter picture in white, brown and blue tones. The picture, in quadratic form like the pictures of Gustav Klimt, conveys a familiar winter picture to us through its details and artistic ability. In this connection, it can also be called the small form of Beck's contemporary in 1903, Ernst Stöhr. Here, too, we recognize the familiar face of winter.
Georg Kargl could continue this series of Old Masters right up to Peter Bruegel's 1565 famous "Return of the Hunters". But the deliberations of contemporaries on this theme also interests him.
A continuation of the winter's blue tones is also to be found in the large format works of the American Dan Asher, who photographed drifting ice in Greenland and in the Antarctic in 1998. The American artist, Mark Dion, photographed stuffed polar bears from museum plans.
Leaves by Herbert Hinteregger, which highlight questions about technical instructions in skiing – probably from the 50's – are also part of the exhibition. The different techniques, and the – in western Austria often widespread opinion of "skiing as ideology" – is thereby called into question. Also similarly ironic is the loop by Liddy Scheffknecht, who, in her film "Whiteout", leaves an empty space in the racetrack instead of the downhill skier.
And lastly, the thermos flask from the 60's is indicated in the middle of the room. "Schnee von gestern" (literally: yesterday’s snow, but mainly used in German as an idiom meaning “that’s old hat”) is inside it, namely a melted snowball from 2013. Georg Kargl and Christian Weber staged this flask as a reference to Miklos Erdély's "Last Year`s Snow" as a symbol for the passing of a – for us – familiar winter and its representations.
Georg Kargl Fine Arts
1040 Vienna, Schleifmühlgasse 5
Tel: +43 1 585 41 99
Fax: +43 1 /585 41 99-9
email: office@georgkargl.com
www.georgkargl.com
Opening hours: Tue - Fri 11-19 hours, Sat 11-16 hours
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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