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English summaries January 13 - 26
Neues Museum – Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design in Nürnberg
Philip Taaffe – Die Weltsprache des Ornaments (Universal language of ornaments)
27.09.2013 – 06.04.2014
By Matthias Kampmann
“Today, no ornament can be created by someone who lives on our cultural level”, raged the Austrian architect, critic and writer Adolf Loos in 1908 in his programmatic polemic pamphlet “Ornament and Crime”. One would save time and money if formal ornaments would disappear from culture. The militant book was printed in modern lower case. Here, the author waged his war against the taste often found in historicism and Art nouveau – which he had seemed to have won. After all, until today, Modernism in buildings and paintings comes across as geometrical. But what about Theo van Doesburg’s reconstructions of squares? And the industrial still lifes in new photography?
Moreover, it is too bad that Loos thought rather formalistically and completely neglected conceptual issues. Today, the situation is different. A more extensive understanding of ornament allows for a new view. And we also owe this to the American artist Philip Taaffe. With his works, the artist, born 1955, who studied under Hans Haacke, proves that a new cultural level can be reached – with ornamental art. Visitors to the New Museum in Nuremberg can convince themselves. With only five large-format works, presented in a convincing manner.
The works were provided by the collection of the Cologne-based gallery owner Rafael Jablonka and the Cit Art Foundation, as well as the Nuremberg institute. Taaffe’s work is presented in a beautiful square room in which one can enjoy his highly intelligent work. By the way, this is a rather unique undertaking in Germany – Taaffe was once presented here in a retrospective in 2008 in Wolfsburg. But, with the exception of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and the Sammlung Goetz, his works are not shown in other museums.
What is fantastic about Taaffe’s work is the combination of seeing, decoding and interpreting superior issues – with ornamental art. In this way, the exhibtion is unique and entices one to tackle a revision of Modernism. It might be a first step to concentrate on these five unusual paintings in Nuremberg in order to recognize that Modernism has features of ornamentality.
Neues Museum - Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design in Nürnberg
90402 Nuremberg, Klarissenplatz
Tel: +49 911 240 200
Fax: +49 911 240 20 29
email: info@nmn.de
www.nmn.de
Opening hours: Tue – Fri 10.00 - 20.00, Sat, Sun 10.00 - 18.00
Ehemalige BAWAG P.S.K. Contemporary
Brüder Schwadron call to mind
09.01.2014 – 29.01.2014
By Iris Meder
Sometimes you step outside the door and everything seems galvanized. Those who have seen the exhibition on architectural ceramics by the Schwadron brothers will view all of Vienna as if it were glazed over in the same way. These tiles are a familiar part of our everyday surroundings and yet one now contemplates them more attentively: Olbrich-like curls, ovals, and rues, black, white, russet, emerald green, light blue, honey yellow, with reference to the space disposition in multi-coloured wavy or stripped patterns, lined with ornamental friezes with a clearly visible signature: Schwadron Brothers, Vienna, Franz-Josefs-Kai 3.
The exhibition is shown in a space that was designed 1905 by architect Julius Goldschläger and which the Jewish company owned by the Schwadron brothers was forced to sell in 1938, itself one of the most beautiful show pieces of the exhibition. The show was put together in only 4,5 months by the cultural manager Tina Zickler together with the photographer Lisa Rastl . – and encompasses a documentation on Schwadron tiles in Viennese apartment buildings. Numerous “tile scouts” helped the curator by providing essential hints and/or photos.
Numerous, to date, unknown facts about the company of the family were researched for the exhibition. But more importantly, it represents an open awareness of valuing that what might be taken for granted by long-standing city dwellers – the top quality of everyday life, which all of this is ultimately about. And it also deals with raising awareness for the high quality of the Viennese apartment residence buildings constructed in the decade prior to World War One – with their well-structured apartments, generous foyers, carefully composed facades and meticulously treated surfaces. And this is the predominant merit of the exhibition subtitled “call to mind” , an exhibition that is well worth seeing.
Ehemalige BAWAG P.S.K. Contemporary
1010 Wien, Franz Josefs Kai 3
www.projekt-schwadron.at
Opening hours: Mon–Fri 13 – 21 hours, Sat, Sun 11–18 hours
Kunstraum St. Virgil
Cardinal König Art Prize 2013
28.11.2013 – 28.01.2014
By Johanna Hofleitner
“K like Kunst“ in resplendent purple letters on the cover of the small catalogue of the art prize. It's pure coincidence that this time, the "K" could also be coined for the initial of the prevailing prize-winner, Kathi Hofer. But above all, the play on the letter cites a homage from art to the name-giver of the prize: Cardinal Franz König, in whose honour the "Cardinal König Art Prize" was created the year König died in 2004 by the Archbishop of Salzburg, Kothgasser. The following year, in 2005 the first awarding of the prize took place in celebration of Cardinal König's 100th birthday. From the entries of over 300 under-40's artists with primary residence in Austria or South Tirol, the prize valued at Euro 11,000 was awarded to Hans Schabus.
That the Salzburg art prize stands in the shadow of the Vienna prize, as far as publicity is concerned, has, first and foremost, to do with the (for Austria) typical phenomena of the perception of the provinces versus the country's capital. Where the selection of a high-quality jury (Rainer Fuchs, Alois Kölbl, Hubert Nitsch, Angelika Nollert and Margit Zuckriegl) of invited artists such as the prize-winner is concerned, it's an even more fascinating barometer of the young Austrian art scene, not least because in the art prize's accompanying exhibition, the contributions of all invited artists are to be seen – this year, 28 positions, amongst them Lucie Stahl with two collages, Hannes Böck with his poetic video work "Las Encantadas", Manuel Gorkiewicz with a new wall work out of paper and make-up, the current Otto Mauer prize-winner, Luisa Kasalicky, video artist Robert Lima, Markus Proschek with the oppressive, historically critical documentation conceived for Prague, Leopold Kessler, David Moises, Astrid Wagner, Caroline Heider, amongst others.
That the exhibition is located in the large round corridor erected by Wilhelm Holzbauer between 1971 and 1976 on the edge of the City of Salzburg in the Bildungshaus St. Virgil, conveys an intimate charm to the exhibition.
The entry of the prize-winner, Kathi Hofer, born 1981, is to be found almost unobtrusively situated at the beginning of the gallery: the re-interpretation of her installation "Craftivism", originally developed for the MAK gallery in 2012, consisting of a mixture of different hand-made objects, amongst which are copies of exhibits from the museum's collection, everyday objects such as vases and small presents but also some purpose-built pieces of furniture created in the museum's carpentry department, in which Hofer blurs the borders between exhibition pieces and utility objects. The question of value the presentation and the representation of thingscould come under scrutiny, but also the alleged hierarchy of original and copy.
Kunstraum St. Virgil
5026 Salzburg, Ernst-Grein-Strasse 14
Tel: +43(0) 662/ 65 9 01 -0
Fax: +43(0) 662/ 65 9 01 -509
email: office@virgil.at
www.virgil.at
Opening hours: Mon - Sat 8.00 - 22.00 hours, Sun 8.00 - 12.00 hours
Gallery 5020
Hanakam & Schuller – Fagiano e facciata
12.12.2013 – 08.02.2014
By Johanna Hofleitner
Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller call their current exhibition in the Gallery 5020 "Fagiano e facciata" – "Pheasant and Facade". With this title, they also refer to the two corresponding main streams of the multimedia installation whose two architectonic fixtures, which also function as a library, are situated at the end of the gallery: a cube on the left side of the room with an intrinsic plinth for a slide projector, as well as a screen hanging from the ceiling on the right hand side of it.
The video facing the room with "Facciata" projected on the screen to the right (which at the same time, also forms the facade of the ensemble), scans in almost statistical sequel the fascist propaganda architecture of the "E 42" in Rome – a city quarter originally erected for the world fair in 1942 (which never took place), and which was finally used as a venue for the Olympic Summer Games in 1960 under the name E.U.R.
The likewise highly aesthetic, as well as oppressive, endemic pictures, above all in black-white-grey areas, are superimposed with geometric forms and accentuations in the – for Hanakam & Schuller - typical fluorescent marker colours in pink, yellow, sky blue, neon green, mauve, and move themselves in slabs, squares, oblongs and other forms such as colour filters over arcades, paths, squares, plateaus and such like. A projected slide show on the left of the cube cites these forms as isolated and lets them come in like elements from a kaleidoscope.
A completely different film, "Fagiano", is projected directly onto the back wall of the "Facciata", and is averted from the room: this time, the camera is permanently focused on the face of an Italian scholar who is apparently commenting on different, invisible historical paintings by way of the slides. The correlating element of this commentary on the art works, which only exists on the soundtrack, is the continuous mention of a pheasant as a bird, which is apparently present on all these pictures and who, over the course of the art history, becomes a substitute for the peacock. The fluorescent colours projected onto the cube by the slides could also allude to the glorious colours of his (the peacock's) plumage.
Hanakam & Schuller's ensemble appears enigmatic and eccentric and cannot easily be straightforwardly deciphered. "Fagiano e facciata" betake themselves well-nigh provocatively on a risky tightrope walk along the fields of beauty, seduction, power and their staging. It's the complexity and precision of the work which, in the final analysis, demands the sharpening up of both perception and conception.
Galerie 5020
5010 Salzburg, Residenzplatz 10
Tel: + 43 662 848817
email: office@galerie5020.at
www.galerie5020.at
Opening hours: Tue – Fri 15-19 hours, Sat 11-14 hours
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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