GALLERY MAGAZINE | AUTUMN-WINTER 2021

AUTUMN-WINTER 2021

HIGHLIGHTS MAXIMILIAN PRÜFER At the Vienna Biennale HANNAH PERRY ArtScience Museum, Singapore RODRIGO VALENZUELA - Guggenheim Fellowship -Whitney Museum Acquisition -Interview with Forest Muelrath HERMANN NITSCH Valkyrie, Bayreuth Festival

EXHIBITIONS SEP. 4TH - OCT. 2ND / RACHEL MACLEAN OCT. 19TH - NOV. 20TH / KARL KARNER NOV. 25TH - JAN. 25TH / MARKUS REDL

FOCUS ON SEPT. 4TH - OCT. 10TH / JARED GINSBURG OCT. 19TH - NOV. 20TH / ALICIA VIEBROCK NOV. 25TH - JAN. 25TH / THOMAS SUPPER

JARED GINSBURG,Setwork III (2020), Wood, papier-mâché, bamboo, rubber, ink and graphite on paper, 119 x 178 x 4.5 cm (detail)

MAXIMILIAN PRÜFER At the Vienna Biennale

Planet Love Vienna Biennale for Change 2021

In springtime this year Maximilian Prüfer was invited by the MAK (Museum of applied arts) to exhibit at the upcoming Vienna Biennale For Change 2021.

With its motto PLANET LOVE the VIENNA BIENNALE FOR CHANGE 2021 dedicates itself to climate care - one of the greatest challenge of our digital age. Thus, PLANET LOVE means building a fundamentally renewed relationship between people and planet, which aims at using resources considerately rather than maximizing their exploitation, and whose approach is characterized by humility, respect, and appreciation of its biological diversity and beauty.

Following the invitation of the museum, Maximilian Prüfer demonstrates his artistic exploration of natural processes and their transference to the visual image via his project „A Gift From Him“ in which he explores the consequences of environmental destruction upon the pollination process within agriculture.

Installation View: „Climate Care“, Reimagining Shared Planetary Futures Display case and framed works: MAXIMILIAN PRÜFER, A Gift From Him, 2019; Wall: Gudrun Kampl, Schwarzes Gold, 2018 © Stefan Lux/MAK

MAXIMILIAN PRÜFER Performance Handpollination Pear, 2018 Fine Art Print Each 46,5 x 70 cm (Details) © Stefan Lux/MAK

HANNAH PERRY

ArtScience Museum, Singapore

HANNAH PERRY, Shock Absorber, 2018 Exhibition view, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, Photography by Markus Krottendorfer, image curtesy of the artist.

Rage Fluids by artist Hannah Perry, carves two lines through the ArtScience Museum’s Moshe designed gallery space.It vibrates in response to the deep bass tones played periodically through partially hidden speakers. In turn, the material of the sculpture vibrates and amplifies the sounds. Perry’s artwork is a sculptural construction of resonance -- a word derived from the Latin meaning ‘to resound’, or to simultaneously produce and amplify sound.

The exhibition is curated by ArtScience Museum’s Director of Exhibitions, Adrian George, with the project bringing together the works of some of the most renowned local and international sound artists. including Song-Ming Ang, Janet Cardiff, Chen Zhen, Hannah Perry, Hsiao Sheng-Chien, Zul Mahmod, Robert Morris, Carsten Nicolai, Yoko Ono, Christine Sun Kim, Timm Ulrichs and Samson Young.

Orchestral Manoeuvres: See Sound, Feel Sound, Be Sound brings together 32 artists and composers who manipulate, subvert or play with the sound properties of objects, sculpture and text. Works of art in the exhibition charge materials with sound and use objects to hold and/or release it. The exhibition features early forms of musical notation, experimental scores, noise-making sculptures and sound art projects, right through to contemporary works that use technology and science to make objects ‘sing’.

The exhibition in its simplest form looks at sound in four distinct ways: artworks created to make or reference sound; sound-making objects that have been transformed into artworks; scores as instructions for action or music-making;and finally, silence or the absence of sound. The exhibition is a complex soundscape, with different noises overlapping throughout the galleries, while other artworks have been carefully selected to offer a synthesised sonic landscape, giving each work its own voice.

Orchestral Manoeuvres, ArtSience Museum, Singapore 28th August 2021 - 2nd January 2022

RODRIGO VALENZUELA Interview by Forrest Muelrath

I was drawn to the Instagram post you captioned “Post-worker world.”

It’s something I chose as the work has been drifting more toward science fiction. I never really liked science fiction, but I’m growing to like it more. I really love cinéma vérité and filmmaking that is attached to real life, like Carlos Reygadas in Mexico City, Lucrecia Martel in Argentina, or the Dardenne brothers in Belgium—very realistic cinema that deals with working-class issues. But nowadays it feels like the only way to imagine an alternative to capitalism is through sci-fi. In the real world there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for metaphor, whereas in science fiction it’s easier or possible to imagine a world where you can point out the problems of our neoliberalism. When you see that things are being made by hand, you can tell there are flaws; but you can also tell that there is intentionality in the flaws. You can see in my work that there are a lot of problems, but the problems also make it unique. I think understanding the value of labor has been a problem for a long time in contemporary society; it is especially a problem for people who have a lot less power. This gave me the idea for my video The Unwaged (2017) and also the project I’m currently working on.

When you sent me photos of the new work, the first thing I thought of was the Fritz Lang film Metropolis (1927). This seems like a departure from your previous work. With your early work, I get the sense of world building that is very much based on our world. Do you have a world in mind when you create your work, or is it more like a different world is possible?

The first thing you have to be aware of is that you can only imagine scenes when there is some reference already. It’s first about eliminating certain facts from your mind. So you can imagine a world proposing an alternative to capitalism or against the things you already know. I don’t want you to read this like another artist making superficial Marxist work because there are only a few ways to escape the transactional nature of our society. Maybe a kinder, more ethical capitalism can become the product of science fiction. This is one of the reasons why I build my own sets. In the case of Stature it starts with a box made of concrete. I think through the material. I’ve spent a lot of time working with concrete while working construction in Boston. But concrete is also a material that you usually associate with institutions, with structures of power. You won’t see a bank or a hospital made out of wood. The institutions that we respect are made out of concrete. So to portray the feeling of an institution I have to build the box first.

In the case of my work now which features a lot of smoke and steam, it’s kind of a living machine; it’s like living in this factory where the workers are no longer there. What happens in fifty years after people are no longer working there? I think it’s very important to remark on the conditions that facilitated the rise of the middle-class when people were advocating for the forty-hour work week, for the right to sit-down, for minimum wage. These are things we’re going to lose when we don’t go to work. You’re not going to know if there are other workers who are in need.

RODRIGO VALENZUELA Installation view of “new works for a post worker’s world” at Patricia Ready Gallery. Santiago, Chile 2021, courtesy of the artist

It’s impossible to strike now because workers are already so divided in the gig economy. I found the conversation that the workers are having in your video Prole (2015) about labor and wages very interesting and similar to conversations I have observed or participated in while working for an Argentinian. It seems to me that in Latin America there is a base level of sophistication about economics that we don’t broadly have in the United States. I’m wondering if there is something to this or if I’m just imagining it. Do Latin Americans inherently understand alternatives to capitalism better than people born in the United States?

Certainly there is a fear of socialism in the US that is more of a cartoon version of socialism, more related to a socialist dictator and an autocracy; but there are already a lot of socialist structures put in place here. Just look at the military. People in the military are likely to lean to the right, but they are the only ones that benefit from a socialist structure with health insurance, housing, and even paid college tuition.

I think the fear has to do with the more power you give to the people, the more large corporations will struggle. Divide and conquer has been a very successful strategy. There is this singular character in the American narrative, and this is a problem. In the American movie, you are the main character. My movie Tertiary (2018) that I showed at the Kitchen in New York City a few years ago is about this place you have in the world when you are a person of color. From the movies to the markets, you are put in a supporting role. When you start off in a supporting role, you already are okay with socialism to some degree. You are already in the position where you are not the protagonist. And on the other hand, you are the one everyone else structures the world around in order to be normal. To come back to my current project, it is not by chance that automatization is tried first on jobs like supermarket cashiers, sewing factories, and transportation—jobs that historically have been held by women and people of color.

Do you feel like it’s the white Americans, perhaps American capitalists, who are the protagonists in a global struggle?

They are in two ways. Very literally Chile is one of the most successful neoliberal experiments perhaps in history. We have adopted every possible form of privatization. In the 1970s when Salvador Allende came to power he nationalized everything so that the state came into control of all these incredible resources.

This prompted the coup d’état. The CIA stepped in and said that this is communism. But Allende’s was a democratic election, and for us it was the right thing because we weren’t collecting taxes on our land while the American companies were making all the money. Neoliberalism then became a Chilean project. The government gave scholarships to economists to go to Chicago and study under Milton Friedman—we call them the Chicago Boys. It was a project to slowly institutionalize neoliberalism, and it was a successful project. The current president, Sebastián Piñera, one of the richest guys in South America, was one of the Chicago Boys. Piñera took over our national airline. He also bought all of the ATMs. Slowly, what started out as a privatization project became more of a monopoly.

I think the Americans have been much more successful directing the world’s gaze toward American values via foreign policy and pop culture. In the history books we find speculative moral justifications for the bombings and the state terrorism created in other countries. But perhaps the most lasting contribution is building neoliberalism and capitalism as an ideology and a symbol of freedom for all the young people.

Whether we like it or not, one of the most important contributions America has made is to impose neoliberalism on the world. So now we really all have to fight because we are all embedded in it.

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b.Santiago, Chile 1982) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, where he is the Assistant Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. Valenzuela has been awarded the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; Joan Mitchell award for painters and sculptors; Art Matters Foundation grant; and Artist trust Innovators Award.

Recent solo exhibitions include: New Museum, NY; Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, AU; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene; Orange County Museum; Portland Art Museum; Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Recent residencies include: Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; MacDowell Colony; Bemis Center for contemporary arts; Lightwork; and the Center for Photography at Woodstock.

Rodrigo Valenzuela has been awarded the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography for his project The Unwaged, which looks at the contentious position of the unpaid intern in the contemporary workplace, making a connection between personal endurance and surviving the stress of what the artist calls “capital oppression.”

Valenzuela also received the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship 2021 to continue his research on the history of labor unions in the USA.

HERMANN NITSCH Valkyrie, Bayreuth Festival

Hermann Nitsch followed the honorable invitation by the Bayreuth Festival and staged the “Valkyrie” with a painting action under the musical direction of Pietari Inkinen.

“Because of the corona crisis, Bayreuth performs the “valkyrie” concertante. the singers will stand at the edge of the stage like at an oratorio. As an action artist, i have been invited to stage an actionistic event during the musical course of all three acts of the “Valkyrie”. i would like to realize a painting action. The used poured and smeared colors of the entire rainbow spectrum will concur with the colorfulness of Wagner’s music in a positive sense. The painting actions are preliminary stages of my own orgies mysteries theater, which i have developed in Prinzendorf. I am especially looking forward to the continuous flow of luminous paint from top to bottom during these three acts. The painting processes will be music. Sounds will become colors.”

Hermann Nitsch, March 2021

BAYREUTH FESTIVAL, VALKYRIE, 2021 Musical direction: Pietari Inkinen Painting action: Hermann Nitsch Photography by Enrico Nawrath courtesy of Bayreuth Festival

HERMANN NITSCH New Works

Hermann Nitsch - New Works

The nitsch museum Mistelbach is presenting the exhibition „Hermann Nitsch - New Works“.

On display will be some 80 large-format paintings by the universal artist from the two new painting periods, the 81st and 82nd painting performance. They were all created in the period between July 2019 and April 2020. These current works captivate with completely new, bright colour compositions, inspired by peonies and other spring flowers. Visualisations of the Nitsch symphonies will be on display in the chapel of the museum area.

“It gives me great joy to concentrate on the flower-coloured luminosity of the smeared colour substance in my work, which i am still able to produce at the age of eighty. More than ever, resurrection is a principle for me.“ (Hermann Nitsch, 2019) In this exhibition, Hermann Nitsch surprises with a sumptuous colour palette of bright shades, in which intense colour clusters with a relief-like feel meet with a transcendental lightness. An unmistakable resurrection cycle has emerged in the work of Hermann Nitsch.

Together with works from other disciplines and the painting cycles, the nitsch museum shows a complete installation of new works by the universal artist.

HERMANN NITSCH 2021, Nitsch Museum, Mistelbach, Austria, photography courtesy of the Nitsch Museum.

HERMANN NITSCH Schüttbild, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 200 x 300 cm

EXHIBITIONS RACHEL MACLEAN

SEPT. 4TH - OCT. 2ND

KARL KARNER

OCT. 19TH - NOV. 20TH

MARKUS REDL

NOV. 25TH - JAN. 25TH

photography by Manuel Carreon Lopez

RACHEL MACLEAN

You play all the parts of your films yourself. What does it feel like when you‘re playing characters that are often violent or beastly or grotesque?

Interview by curator Phoebe Cripps

You spend so much of your time as a woman being pressured into trying to look ‘beautiful’. However, beauty is inherently out of reach, which makes sense commercially, as if it were something accessible then you wouldn’t need to spend so much money striving to achieve it. However ugliness doesn’t need to cost you anything. Consequently, I find purposefully presenting myself as ‘ugly’ is subversive, and feels liberating for that reason. You are deliberately going against what society is telling you to do and be.

What is your own relationship to the internet these days?

Can’t live without it. Same as most people I guess… Artistically, I’ve gone down a few interesting worm holes recently. I found a whole genre of My Little Pony fan art where the ponies are crying in the rain.

Some of the images are beautifully rendered digital paintings and others are scuzzy Microsoft paint style sketches. There is something powerful and totally weird about them, a strange subculture that only the internet could throw up.

What is your own relationship to consumerism/advertising at the moment?

I love stuff, especially the weird consumer goods that are thrown up by a culture with an insatiable lust for things. AliExpress is fascinating, you can pretty I much think of any weird combination of object and animal and they’ll sell it: frog toilet brush, giraffe earrings… I find these objects fascinating. However, the impulse to make and reproduce them is totally out of control. The planet is seizing under the pressure of giraffe earrings being shipped half way across the world. The lives and environments we are willing to destroy in the pursuit of frog toilet brushes is a kind of madness.

I think there is a kind of madness more generally to creative production, which I recognise as an artist.

I’ve never understood how art therapy works. To me art making is a compulsive addiction, something driving you to make weird things and forego sleeping and socialising in that pursuit. I think consumerism distorts and grotesquely exaggerates something that is inherent to creativity: the feeling of an urgent necessity to make unnecessary things.

Can you talk about your process of making the new prints for the exhibition?

I’ve been trying something new with this. The images were shot in 2015 when I made ‘Feed Me’, but I didn’t have the opportunity to do anything with them then, so it’s been great to have the chance to come back to this idea.

The works are acrylic prints in the style of an advert. They are printed in 3 layers. The back image is a character pressing up against the glass, and the front two layers create the illusion of condensation, dirt and graffiti. I intend for it to be confusing whether the characters are looking at an advert, or trapped in one. The idea of inside and outside space is intentionally unstable. Like with a lot of my work, they aesthetically play between glossiness and decay.

How do you feel to be showing in Vienna for the first time?

Photo by David Bebber

Great! Vienna is a seminal city in the history of art, which I know about from afar, but have never been.

The ‘curated by’ festival is all the more exciting because it’s been so long since I have installed or seen art in real life.

RACHEL MACLEAN i‘m 2 happy! Curated by Phoebe Cripps SEPT. 4th - OCT. 2nd

„Look sweetheart. None of this is real. It‘s just a game that the grown-ups are playing.

All you gotta do is play along. OK?“ The game is late-stage capitalism, and its appetite is insatiable. Consume or be consumed. Feed yourself, and your dreams. Achieve true happiness by sustained success. Rate yourself, and survey everything you purchase and consume, so we can continue improving and innovating. If there was a symbol for this era, it might be the smiley face. In Rachel Maclean’s work, wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked smiley faces unnerve in how saccharinely they radiate the cyclical violence of consumerism.

Part of that violence lies in how companies infantilise us to manipulate our decisions. In Feed Me (2015), one of Maclean’s longest and most ambitious films to date, society’s simultaneous infantilisation and sexualisation of women is portrayed through the classic fairytale story between beast and young girl.

In what could be a reworking of the seven deadly sins – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth – Maclean constructs an entire world encrusted with prosthetics and crystallised by hairspray, at once slick, shiny, cute, and dirty, seedy, dripping with disgust. In its artifice, theatricality, playful irony and exaggeration, the work oozes camp, and yet at the same time its dark humour criticises the very thing it mines.

Maclean conceives, designs and acts all of the characters herself, using actors for the voices, which she then lip-syncs. Part-musical, part-fable, Feed Me features a cast of humans and beasts often in interchangeable roles – demonstrating the hypocrisy of a society that is quick to demonise men accused of paedophilia as monsters, but continues to sexualise young girls. Doomed to fail, traps are set for young women who must simultaneously prove both their innocence and their allure. In Feed Me, Maclean’s characters speak in hyperbolic language reminiscent of overachievement and marketing platitudes: they proclaim that they’re too happy, and are constantly striving for 110%. Festooned with curtains, glittery carpet, and a series of new digital prints, the gallery is similarly too much, a hyper-sensation of both cuteness and absurdity.

Installed near the entrance, Maclean’s 2013 film Germs takes on a new layer of meaning in our postpandemic world. Her army of invasive, giggling bacteria seem adorably harmless at first, yet quickly our self-protection becomes commodified, killing not just the germs but also ourselves. Our self-imaging – through the internet, through advertising – has siphoned off to the economy every part of our bodies, and, in Maclean’s parallel universe, even our souls. There are times in her films when you see the edge of her costumes: the seam of the prosthetics, the wig cap, the layers of makeup embedded in fake wrinkles. Her characters are all the more grotesque in their unravelling – no longer just monstrous versions of ourselves, but also melting and breaking before our eyes. „But why do we keep making new products? Why do we keep innovating? I‘ll tell you why.

Because we realise that success is just temporary. You get hungry, but you‘ve just eaten. Right?“

Text by: Phoebe Cripps

RACHEL MACLEAN Video stills from „Germs“, 2013 Courtesy of the artist

RACHEL MACLEAN Video stills from „Feed Me“, 2015, Courtesy of the artist

KARL KARNER Brutbladd OCT. 19th - NOV. 20th

Karl Karner’s most recent body of work that will be presented at his upcoming exhibition at Galerie Kandlhofer is the ’Brutbladd’ series - named after the ‘Brutblatt’ (bryophyllum). The bryophyllum plants appear in a mythical, installative setting, in which a network of media and material allusions and references unfolds. A sensorially dense play of confusion unfolds between anthropomorphic aluminum casts, grotesquely overdrawn cephalopods and cartoonish pumpkin-head chimeras, fire bowls and planters in which things grow, wither, burn, smoke and smell.

Karner’s controlled artistic design and provoked natural processes intertwine here, are negotiated with one another, and reveal the works as seemingly naïve, pseudoexperimental experimental setups that are, however, by no means completed or evaluated. His sculptures rather encourage the viewer to continue them or even care for them. They demand attention, the involvement of an audience, and thus also raise questions about their realization.

The artist invites us to a broad discourse that questions assumed dichotomies and oppositions and seeks to playfully blur demarcation lines between sculpture and biological experimental arrangement, object and audience. Within his practice, he breaks with expectations, traditional patterns of reception and behavior and questions the role and concept of (extended social) sculpture as well as that of the audience and their relationship to each other.

Excerpt from Press Release written by Valentin Häckl

KARL KARNER Night Lumes, 2021, Paint on Aluminium,65 x 45 x 182 cm, Photography by Manuel Carreon Lopez

KARL KARNER Brutbladd OCT. 19th - NOV. 20th

KARL KARNER Left: KSBrutbladd, 2021, aluminium, feather, egg, dirt, plastic material, lighter Right:STARLight, 2021, aluminium, brick, moss, spruce, silicone, chain, dirt, hoofbalm, nose ring, shell Photo by Killian Flitsch

MARKUS REDL Flussmitte NOV. 25th - JAN. 25th

MARKUS REDL Stein 156–157131 [Wendemittel] 2021 Bianco Carrara Marmor, Nero Belgio, Rosa Portogallo, 145 x 50 x 40 cm, 340 kg 131 Siehe: Jan Assmann, Der Tod als Thema der Kulturtheorie, Frankfurt am Main 2000; Chinua Achebe, Alles zerfällt, Frankfurt am Main 2014.

The Calligrapher‘s Manual A self-contained bundle of work constitutes the starting point for this publication: In recent years, but especially during the last few months, Markus Redl has developed an artistic signature that is both open and versatile, complex and highly concentrated, expansive and thoroughly explorative, and it has brought something to light that is not common in other attributions of artistic practice: Some kind of extended definition of art that links sculpture with drawing, relates three-dimensionality to linearity, reveals the writing in drawing, discovers the sign within objecthood, practically places the style, as a form of rhetoric, above the choice of means. The artist, as a writer who draws; virtually a calligrapher, a scribe, as well as a writing-being, who adopts the world of thought of his literary role models and transfers it to his own cosmos of thoughts and images. “Where signs, writing and image touch, a point is reached at which the narrative begins“, says Markus Redl and defines this critical approach more precisely not as a differentiation, but actually as an energetic zone, an intersection of lines of force. The act of writing is both concentration and condensation, whereas the world of images intertwines the textual with the vast, almost infinite, mapping of the visual. Markus Redl‘s bundles of images and texts give evidence of a newly created synopsis of adopted, assimilated text fragments and pictorial pieces of loot taken from one‘s individual everyday life and environment – they therefore constitute a bound form while the content simultaneously remains unbound. As through the meditative exercises in medieval scriptoria, books and codices can thus be created that do not only preserve traditional texts but integrate them furthermore into a new, current world view. An atlas of knowledge emerges, resulting from a combination of acquired insights and topical research. When “The last man who knew everything“1, the universal scholar Athanasius Kircher, created his world view in the 17th century, he built an immeasurable edifice of thought in which physical collections, utopian texts, visionary findings, adventurous theories, and explicative illustrations came together to form a whole that was to mark a symptomatic turning point on the threshold of a new era of enlightenment. Markus Redl, too, has reached a symptomatic point: Based on the impact of the time of the pandemic and the reflections during it, he asks himself questions about the possibilities of knowledge, insights through memory, the importance of determining one‘s own coordinates.

John Glassie, A Man of Misconceptions, New York, 2012. The German edition of the book (Berlin 2014) was published under the title “Der letzte Mann, der alles wusste“ (= eng. The last man who knew everything).

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MARKUS REDL Flussmitte NOV. 25th - JAN. 25th Mapping of the Self

The Fugitive Archivist

Markus Redl believes in the universality of the mind, and therefore in the figure of the scientist and artist as it has been known since the Renaissance. His knowledge can be found in the writings, selected by him and assigned to him. Hence, it is also a statement about his self. Just as a portrait artist always includes himself in the portrait of the model, which happens more or less unconsciously, Redl integrates the writings of his selected authors into his own work: „ anyone who paints portraits portrays himself „, states the author José Saramago in his „Manual of Painting and Calligraphy“2 and lets his doubtful painter ponder the question of how the world and the self could be better understood: „Does this mean that I get closer to myself by means of writing rather than through painting?”. Could Redl‘s present book be regarded as a reader rather than a picture book? He creates a new format that, within the transmediality of text, cipher, image and information, signifies not only a mapping of his environment but above all of his self.

Situated in archives of the mind are encyclopaedias and atlases, bestiaries and books of hours, breviaries and multi-volumed encyclopaedias, and furthermore, fascicles written in secret scripts or transcribed manuscripts of foreign cultures and languages. Each person is an archivist of their memories and visions, a custodian of their imaginary diaries and cosmologies of pictures. „Every body is an archive,“ writes Markus Redl in his „Library of Stones“3 and designs an examination of time based on an alphabet of symbolic finger language. In addition, passages of text by various authors are thrown in like stones, and a wealth of images serves as a catalogue in its own right. Like a fugitive archivist, Markus Redl releases his œuvre into the autonomy of pure existence; he refuses an explanatory structure and consigns the objects to the sphere of their own efficacy. Texts achieve the same, inherent autonomy as sculptures, lines of writing are as significant as carved figures, ink is as precious as marble. Redl‘s archive of works contains sculptures, drawings, typefaces, and graphic cycles. His artistic work is a continuous interplay, a texture of creations that cannot be broken down into individual disciplines. Furthermore, the encounter of the demeanour of writing and the drawn design, of ciphers and codes, of the sculptural and the letterist is a universal visual language that characterises Markus Redl‘s work. His archivist‘s shelf4 could hold all knowledge, all writing, all thinking – an object that simultaneously pays homage to the monumental and the tiny, a universal cipher for the ungraspable and the illimitable in the quest for knowledge.

The fugitive archivist hands his store of knowledge over to us, he leaves us his shelves, just as a certain Plume5 gives us his notes in Henri Michaux‘s graphic as well as literary work: Accounts of experiences and insights, of journeys and reflections, an amalgam of everyday life as well as utopia and an ocean of impressions; “The life of A., one of these nondescript existences—and yet the Ocean!, the Ocean!—making his way, going where? And his self a mystery.”

Exercises in Adoption To read a text means to follow it, to trace the author‘s ideas and wordings. But copying a text involves a higher degree of devotion; it consists in making the text passage virtually one‘s own, in transferring it into one‘s own handwriting. „Since starting to write, I have copied texts on a number of occasions for one reason or another: to reinforce or contradict some statement of mine, or because I could not have expressed it better myself,“ reflects Saramago‘s artist protagonist, who transfers from visual art to literature because he believes that it would offer him a boarder scope for the narrative. Thus, the postulate of authenticity is not discarded but rather taken into another sphere, assigned to a carefully thought-out strategy. Markus Redl is a recipient who approaches his texts for various reasons and through more discriminating modes of adoption: They are the materials and building blocks for his work at the intersection of image and word. His gesture is that of a calligrapher, giving the strings of written and adopted letters a form of their own; his form. In addition to the tapestries of words, he builds a resource of miniatures, aiming at being an association rather than an illustration. Thus, Redl‘s exercises in adoption give rise to word-picture collages, dialogically assembled, summarised as codices from the writing workshop of a tale-telling observer of the world.

Text: Margit Zuckriegl

The Life of Things In an art context, the simple things of everyday life have never received more attention and appreciation than during the era of New Objectivity. In different countries, and under different labels, artists turned their attention to things of their immediate surroundings. Notably, it was here that photography had established its first, dominant position since it provided a new way of seeing, which was no longer bound to the immediate visual impression of the human being: macro- and micro-photography, collapsing perspectives appear also in paintings, and to zoom in on something and to isolate it from a narrative context are common practice. Markus Redl subjects the things and everyday objects he targets to such a new-objective examination; they acquire an autonomous status, emancipate themselves from their role as actors in a narrative context, and push into the foreground. Vegetables, corkscrews, toothbrushes, and cheese graters step into the limelight, into the artist‘s field of vision and tell of their specific characteristics: They own a defined function, an inherent shape, i.e. a life of their own. Markus Redl, however, is an artist who takes the objectivity of his things a step further. He formulates them in a pictorial language that, in the photographic sense, comes so close to the actual appearance of things that they can be read as such – yet his analogies and threads of associations extend far beyond the mere being of things. Whereas about 100 years ago the things were the – yet to be discovered – protagonists of a new understanding of still life, torn from their inconspicuousness, in Markus Redl‘s work they now become enigmatic informers in a never-ending story, simultaneously abandoning the apparent nature of their presence in favour of a comprehensive subjectification.

MARKUS REDL Drawings from: Der Unterland-Zyklus I 42,0 x 59,7 cm, Graphite, Charcoal, Typewriter, Paper

Markus Redl, Space Saturated with Stories/Library of Stones, Vienna 2019 Markus Redl, Stein 154 (The Archivist‘s Shelf), Bianco Carrara Marmor, 2019, 240x180x150 cm 5 Henri Michaux, A Certain Plume, 2017, New York (plume: French for feather)

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José Saramago, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, Manchester, 1994

Galerie Kandlhofer is pleased to introduce “Focus“ a new section to the gallery program, providing a platform for different artistic positions. The section will run concurrently with the gallery’s main exhibition program in the project room and focus on bringing a diverse range of artistic aesthetics and voices to the gallery to form a broader cultural and aesthetic dialogue.

FOCUS ON JARED GINSBURG

SEPT. 4TH - OCT. 10TH

ALICIA VIEBROCK

OCT. 19TH - NOV. 20TH

THOMAS SUPPER

NOV. 25TH - JAN. 25TH

photography by Manuel Carreon Lopez

SEPT. 4TH - OCT. 10TH

FOCUS ON JARED GINSBURG

Jared Ginsburg uses art-making to explore alternative modes of knowledge production and transfer. He recognizes art as a tool, a means to test and probe the world, hoping to nurture new strategies for productive engagement.

Ginsburg employs a range of media types in his practice, including painting, sculpture, drawing, video and performance.

Kinetic sculptures are integral to his repertoire, created by combining found objects in movement with rudimentary methods of construction. An ongoing series of sculptural drawings composed of bamboo, rubber and string, the ‘Hanging Drawings’ began as an attempt to translate an ink drawing into three-dimensional space, and soon they became exercises in composition in and of themselves. In his ‘Wall painting’ series, large-scale canvasses are layered with histories of note-making and drawings – a kind of private archaeology, which covers and reveals through a process of painting-over and sandingaway. Seeking “indeterminacy or chance operations” in his process, Ginsburg‘s studio plays a significant role; at once a lab, an instrument and a character in conversation.

To date, Ginsburg has had six solo exhibitions, most recently ‘Hanging Drawings’ at the Maitland Institute in Cape Town. Group shows include ‘The thing itself exists everywhere’, blank projects, Cape Town (2020), ‘the head the hand’, blank projects, Cape Town (2019), ‘blank’ at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin (2018), Sculpture at the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius (2018), ‘More for Less’ at A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town (2018), ‘A Painting Today’ at Stevenson, Cape Town (2017), ‘Artists and Architecture, Variable Dimensions’ at the Emily Harvey Foundation, New York (2016), and ‘The Morning I Killed A Fly’ at Galleria Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2015). In 2018, Ginsburg participated in the Idris Naim residency in Oaxaca, Mexico, culminating in the group exhibition ‘Hacer Noche’. Ginsburg’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, A4 Arts Foundation, and the Rennie Collection.

JARED GINSBURG, Setwork III, 2020, wood, papier-mâché, bamboo, rubber, ink and graphite on paper, 119 x 178 x 4.5 cm, photography curtesy of Blank Projects

OCT. 19TH - NOV. 20TH

FOCUS ON ALICIA VIEBROCK „Alicia Viebrock, a Herbert Brandl student, stands for the gestural and expressive variant of abstraction. Spontaneous calligraphic, powerful brush movements and coloured sprinklings on a mostly neutral or monchrome background recall the German post-war Informell. Partially even figurative appearances like boats or vegetative elements materialize in Viebrocks ink paintings on canvas that come out as playful-eruptive and fluid-transparent at the same time.“ - Thomas Groetz

Alicia Viebrock (b. 1986, Munich) currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Viebrock studied Art History and Fine Arts at the Art History and Fine Arts, University of Regensburg (2009), The Academy of Fine Arts, Mainz (2009) and The Academy of Fine Arts, Düsseldorf, in the class of Herbert Brandl (2017).

Viebrock’s solo exhibitions include: ‘Casino Peach’, Galerie Heinz Holtmann, Cologne (2020), ‘Amnesia Royal’, FILIALE, Frankfurt am Main (2020), ‘calories’, FILIALE, Frankfurt am Main (2018), ‘Nightfly’, Galerie Heinz Holtmann, Cologne (2018), ‘Rule of derivation’, Kunstverein Recklinghausen (2017), ‘Of Loners and Charmeurs’, FILIALE, Frankfurt am Main (2017).

Selected group exhibitions include: ‘Garten Eden’, FILIALE, Frankfurt am Main (2020), Summer Group Show 2020, Galerie Heinz Holtmann, Cologne (2020), ‘jetzt!’ - Junge Malerei in Deutschland, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum Wiesbaden, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2019), ‘Miniaturen’, FILIALE, Frankfurt am Main (2019), ‘Some Trees’, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2019), ‘New Acquisitions’, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA (2018), ‘salondergegenwart’, Leopoldshof, Hamburg (2018), ‘QUINTESSENZ’, Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin (2017), ‘Summer Group Show’, Galerie Heinz Holtmann (2017), ‘Cologne Apobank Audience Prize’, Exhibition, K21, Düsseldorf (2017), ‘Noch neuere neue Malerei’, NRW Bank, (2015), ‘Düsseldorf Kontinuum’, Kultur Bahnhof Eller (2015), ‘Blended’, Upstairs Gallery, Oldenburg (2014), ‘Luzifer’, Exhibition with Christian Seidler, Bachstr. 139 – 142, Düsseldorf (2014), ‘Exhibition of the Class of Herbert Brandl’, Kultur Bahnhof Eller, Düsseldorf (2013).

ALICIA VIEBROCK,Untitled, 2021, ink and acrylic on canvas, 160 x 170 cm, (detail) photography by Wolfgang Günzel

NOV. 25TH - JAN. 25TH

FOCUS ON THOMAS SUPPER

The approach of Thomas Supper’s artistic work is conceptual painting.

Painting on steel plates is made visible through heat and different temperatures. The voluntary impulse of alienation transforms profound and technical processes into painterly gestures. Fat insults and disturbs the material and creates a space of reflection and projection for the viewer and the omnipresent environment around him. A close connection between perspective and arrangement is created, an endless interplay between presence and the outside world. These conceptual paintings could probably best be described as „plastic material fields“, which find their starting point in the material: Steel and fat, worked in an induction oven.

The oven is heated to 600 degrees and as a result violates the material in different ways. When the steel plate is positioned vertically in the oven, a gradient of colour is created, when it is positioned horizontally, a uniform one. Grease on the surface creates another layer of colour reduction. Large works are created in several modules. It is crucial to catch the exact time window so that the painterly colour nerve is hit.

Thomas Supper (b 1994, Oberwart/Burgenland) currently lives and works between Vienna and Feldbach, AT. Since 2018 Supper studies Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under Prof. Mag. Brigitte Kowanz. Since 2014 he has been working at the Loderer art foundry in Mühldorf near Feldbach.

Selected group exhibitions include: viennacontemporary (2019); hayday mayday, (2019) Thomas Supper & Sophia Laysheva, Laurenz Space, Wien, AT (2020); Overstrained, KS Room, Kornberg, Feldbach, AT (2020)

THOMAS SUPPER, Untitled, 2019, 60/80/0,3 cm, Stainless steel, fat, Foto: Vanessa Mazanik

CREDITS

CONTACT Galerie Kandlhofer Brucknerstrasse 4, 1040 Vienna, Autria info@kandlhofer.com +43 1 503 1167

MARKUS REDL - Catalogue, ‘Flussmitte - Porträts der Dinge’.

- Stein 156–157 [Wendemittel] 2021, Bianco Carrara Marmor, Nero Belgio, Rosa Portogallo, 145 x 50 x 40 cm, 340 kg. Image curtesy of the artist.

- Drawings from: ‘Der Unterland-Zyklus I’, 42,0 x 59,7 cm, Graphite, Charcoal, Typewriter, Paper. Image courtesy of the artist.

MAXIMILIAN PRÜFER - Installation View: ‘Climate Care’, Reimagining Shared Planetary Futures, Display case and framed works: ‘A Gift From Him’, 2019; Wall: Gudrun Kampl, Schwarzes Gold, 2018. © Stefan Lux/MAK. - ‘Performance Handpollination Pear’, 2018, Fine Art Print, Each 46,5 x 70 cm (Details) © Stefan Lux/MAK. HANNAH PERRY - Installation view, ‘Rage Fluids’, exhibited in ‘Shock Absorber’, 2018, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, Photography by Markus Krottendorfer. Image courtesy of the artist.

RODRIGO VALENZUELA - Installation view of “new works for a post worker’s world” at Patricia Ready Gallery. Santiago, Chile 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.

HERMANN NITSCH - Bayreuth Festival, ‘Valkyrie’, 2021, Musical direction: Pietari Inkinen, Painting action: Hermann Nitsch, Photography by Enrico Nawrath courtesy of Bayreuth Festival.

- ‘Schüttbild‘, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 200 x 300 cm.

- ‘Nitsch Museum’, 2021, Mistelbach, Austria. Photography courtesy of the Nitsch Museum.

RACHEL MACLEAN - ‘Portrait’, 2021. Photography by David Bebber - Video stills from ‘Germs’, 2013. Courtesy of the artist - Video stills from ‘Feed Me’, 2015. Courtesy of the artist KARL KARNER - Night Lumes, 2021, Paint on Aluminium,65 x 45 x 182 cm, Photography by Manuel Carreon Lopez.

- ‘KSBrutbladd’, 2021, aluminium, feather, egg, dirt, plastic material, lighter and STARLight, 2021, aluminium, brick, moss, spruce, silicone, chain, dirt, hoofbalm, nose ring, shell. Photography by Killian Flitsch.

JARED GINSBURG - ‘Setwork III’ (2020), wood, papier-mâché, bamboo, rubber, ink and graphite on paper, 119 x 178 x 4.5 cm (detail). Photography courtesy of Blank Projects.

- ‘Setwork III’, 2020, wood, papier-mâché, bamboo, rubber, ink and graphite on paper, 119 x 178 x 4.5 cm. Photography courtesy of Blank Projects.

ALICIA VIEBROCK - ‘Untitled’, 2021, ink and acrylic on canvas, 160 x 170 cm, (detail). Photography by Wolfgang Günzel.

THOMAS SUPPER - ‘Untitled’, 2019, 60/80/0,3 cm, stainless steel, fat. Photography by Vanessa Mazanik.