[9:40 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

The images constantly seduce the gaze, captivate it and invite the viewer to transcend the pictorial surface, look behind it in order to discover the spaces opening up within their –our- interior.
Brandl does not start his work on the basis of reality in order to abstract from it, he rather develops a pictorial grammar of perception –feelings or thoughts- and avails himself of the musical vocabulary of colour and of the personal expressive panache as trademark.

However, he counterbalances and controls this approach by the structure of his composition and a certain irony. He systematically measures the contrast between emotion ands reflection. Problems related to the perception of space are dealt with, depth without the rivalry of perspective and illusion but nevertheless within the vocabulary of abstraction. He completes the meaningful content with his associations to other contemporary or traditional pictorial languages.
All this without denying the character of his imagery, the surfaces painted by vigorous strokes, the texture, the masterful chromatic induction permitting him to create art like primitive man, who creates a radically sensual material world with his own hands.

In Brandls pictures forceful fillings and dense strokes contrast with a smooth blurriness reminding a veiling, evoking a sense of lightness and transparency and conveying the presence of other layers of light and colour within the deeper realms of the image.
Some of the works constitute quasi pictorial texts, formed by the artist through a network of textures and surfaces, and enriched by the incision of the brush into the ductile material, leaving enigmatic messages. In spite of their informalism, the images act like symbolic approximations to the landscape. Shades of grey and yellow protruding into dark spaces remind of nocturnal landscapes, blazing red specks bring volcanic eruptions to mind, apparent fissures evoke aerial photographs of rivers or cartographic images.
The transparencies and veilings behave like a sunblind, letting traces of other colours shine through as if they were hints to an opening of a parallel world.
Two elements, the abstract and the representational coexist on the same canvas and do not interpenetrate; each one keeps its relative, not absolute, autonomy in order to make way for the ambiguous play of he visual suspense.

This incongruence and the contradiction existing between the elements is intentional - and necessary to generate and animate their relationship.

These correlations operate in a symbolic and libidinal way within the images, as well as other formal contents which interact and can be combined as a visual or interpretative antithesis.

On this level the enormous energetic charge, dense and luminous, comes to the fore.

The perspective of the retained libidinous energies is a reference to a remote affinity of Brandl’s Art to certain traditions of Chinese painting and some recurrent approaches of contemporary western interpretation of Japanese art, based on the influences of informal art, the material and the dense textures.

A kind of imaginary regression to a cultural nakedness emerges, a disrobement of symbolic contexts – in order not to simply imagine a naked corporeality that invites us to identify ourselves with the work through the intimity of our own nakjed body.

It is ultimately a question of controlling the drives, avoiding them to overflow, containing them to the point where the whole arrangement is on the verge of exploding. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, we are relieved of hidden repressions. (ca)

[8:06 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

„Thus my work completes itself by the sculpture.“ (TOMAK)
The sculpture series PHANTOMAK was produced in the course of the past one and a half years. The works were manufactured in close cooperation with the Vienna University of Technology (institute of art and design – spatial development and modelling), the German company Rampf Tooling and an Austrian foundation. CastYourArt is responsible for the organisation of the project.
The sculpture series Phantomak is composed of eleven busts of the artist TOMAK. For the production of the busts the artist was scanned by a laser at the Vienna University of Technology (institute of art and design – spatial development and modelling) and a digital three dimensional model was manufactured. On the basis of polyurethane, a material of the company Rampf Tooling, moulds of the busts were cast and subsequently eleven identical busts were cut out by an industrial roboter, based on the 3D data. Producing a single bust required approximately hundred hours of milling time. After the cutting out all busts were individualized by the artist. “I made variations of the eleven identical busts, destroyed and remade them, painted, cut, burnt them and completed them with metal applications.” Thus trademark artworks in the style of TOMAK were created as known from his graphical and pictorial oeuvre. (wh/ca)

[3:29 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

Today the Vienna Secession, the union of Austrian artists, is the oldest independent exhibition centre dedicated to contemporary art worldwide. The building designed by the architect Joseph Maria Olbrich is regarded as the structural manifestation of the ideas of this artist’s union around Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Carl Moll, Josef Hoffmann, Olbrich and others, whose members refused the conservative approach to art of the Künstlerhaus association at the turn of the century.
To confront the fin de siècle with a holistic art whose vitality would have its effect down to the ordinary everyday life! By means of the Secession building, this claim would obtain an actual location, in order to present art in a space-oriented and comprehensive way, within a synthesis of architecture, painting, sculpture, graphic art and decoration. The artistic approach with the building as its symbol still draws attention and now as then, the usage of the building causes excitement.
On of the most celebrated exhibitions was dedicated to Ludwig van Beethoven in 1902, a main work of which being the Beethoven Frieze by Gustav Klimt. On this 34-meter mural painting, the artist focused on Beethoven’s 9th symphony. The painting addresses mankind’s pursuit of happiness in various stages. Because of its explicit eroticism, Klimt’s work provoked admiration as well as severe criticism. At the time the Beethoven Frieze was situated in the left side aisle of the Secession’s main hall and was eventually removed in 1903. Today it is back in the Secession and installed in a specifically created room in the basement floor of the building.
With its spatial arrangement, the architecture of the Vienna Secession has remained relevant in our time. Its functionality and aesthetic peculiarity therefore offer ideal conditions for contemporary arts and exhibition activities. Thus, in accordance with the phrase carved above its entrance, to every age its art and to art its freedom, today the Vienna Secession accomplishes an internationally oriented program, presenting current artistic forms of expression in single and thematic exhibitions.
CastYourArt has created a feature about this historical and contemporary venue of the arts, giving an insight into the building, its architecture and history as well as its activities in contemporary art. (wh)

[7:58 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

He states that he wants to free himself from the pressure of being responsible for staff. If necessary he cooperates with other architects, like his wife Wendy Levin. In the last 40 years, more than 500 buildings have been constructed, all in Australia, almost exclusively residential buildings and besides a few exceptions, designed, planned and implemented under his supervision.

The current exhibition in the AzW, conceived by the Architecture Foundation Australia, focuses on constructed private residential houses, on the basis of which the position and ideas of Glenn Murcutt can be comprehended in the most concise manner.

Large-sized plans, design sketches and implementation plans with handwritten remarks illustrate his work, besides a video with himself. He usually develops his projects on 4 to 5 sketches on paper in A2 format, without a computer, in pencil drawing. The construction companies who work with him already know his mode of operation and do not need many instructions. The exhibition offers an interesting insight into known and less known projects.

Except for traditional construction modes, Murcutt indicates Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto as influences, besides the longhouses of New Guinea he had seen in his early childhood. Later he was inspired by traditional Greek buildings, by the contact with the “regionalists” Craig Elwood and Jose Antonio Coderch and not least by Australian aboriginal culture, with its ethic of respect for the environment.

The building materials of his portfolio are manifold – metal, stone, brick, wood and concrete are usually joined in his buildings. These are often structured like long simple pavilions, differing from each other by the way the windows, roofs, and shady- as well as cooling elements are integrated into the structure.

In all his buildings he tries to keep the energy demand to a minimum and to adapt the form to the climatic conditions. He often draws the comparison to a yacht, which is adapted by to the changing elements by the owners when sailing.

Most architects construct as the state of the art of technology permits. This is not Glenn Murcutt’s approach. The feasibility of doing something does not per se legitimize the project. The basic necessities of mankind remain the same; new problems have not to be invented in order to solve them, but the existing ones should be tackled instead. For Murcutt, architecture should be a response and not an imposition.

He does not accept too many contracts, and projects can take up to 5 years. He interviews his clients, takes personal interest in them, wants to know how they think, what they read, eat, and what kind of art they like. The houses are like tailor-made suits; they live with their owners and are adaptable to the stages in their lives.

Murcutt pays close attention to the movements of the sun and moon, the seasons and the landscape. He designs his buildings to adjust them to the movements of light and the wind. Many of his buildings do not have an air condition. The give the impression of open galleries, they remind of Farnsworth house by Mies van der Rohe, although with the pragmatism of a shepherd’s hut. “He is an innovative architectural technician who is capable of turning his sensitivity to the environment and to locality into forthright, totally honest, non-showy works of art.” (Pritzker Prize Jury)

His advice to students is to be patient, because architecture takes time – and to observe, because it is the only way to discover. (ca)

[8:06 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

Aron Demetz eliminates the classical dichotomy of „original vs. effigy”, and instead addresses an interaction: man has a position in the natural space that surrounds him, is formed by it and in turn has an effect on it; this is not a static interaction but rather a continuous, living process. Man and his body become protagonist and theatre of the action at the same time, within the relationship between the single object and its location within space. Demetz’ examination of space demonstrates that the figures enter into a dialogue about the possibilities of the location with the viewer.

Knowledge of the preconditions demanded by wood as a working material is of decisive importance in this approach: its physical nature influences its treatment; additionally a further means is applied: the charring of the surfaces. The power of the elements is being celebrated in coming to be as well as in passing away, furthermore the twofold effect of energies are highlighted: once in growth and then in the fire as a procedure of dematerialisation. Here we are confronted with a deep understanding of the elementary vitality of the wood.

By his preoccupation with wood and his profound artistic exploration of this material Demetz has his place within contemporary art, even though he perceives himself as an outsider. He uses the tree in its various forms of appearance as structure and source of insight. For his figure he uses the chainsaw and the axe, the finer work is done with mallet and chisel. His preliminary studies in figurine format document the precision with which he handles his tools.

Demetz brings us back to the woods and to a time when it was perceived as a sentient, living being. He is an artist who masters his craft as well as the principles of anatomy and its proportions; he produces small figurines of cedar wood as a preparation. With their animate appearance, they seem to return the gaze of the viewer.

This feeling is reinforced by the fact that Demetz does not overwork his material and avoids shaping the surface in a too pleasing manner – he conveys a feeling for the vulnerability of the matter. Demetz does not fear highlighting the mortality and to confront physical limitations, in contrast to any slick aestheticism.
Availing himself of the element of fire, he shapes the surfaces of the sculptures in an intensive, almost ritualistic procedure. The process of this charring profoundly transforms the perception of the figure: a warm, familiar vegetal material turns into something mineral on its surface. The black of the surface requires a different way of seeing, it alters perception. It alludes to the process of growth and decay, and to death.
If man-made effigies should be the only means to confront the reality of ones own physical limitations, in opposition to prototypes manipulated by aesthetics of the advertising industry, Demetz does it with his original material and formal vocabulary. Within his figurative approach his genuine truth of the world is mirrored.
Rather than mere bodies, he displays bodiliness. Even though he is neither too reduced nor cautious in his formal language, walking a fine line he manages to convey a feeling of inner fragility and subtlety without becoming sentimental. He is also able to show wit without becoming ridiculous. Demetz liberates his figures from everything that would turn them into individuals, and carves out a clear, vivid humanity that has a real and unembellished sensual feel to it. (ca)

[3:18 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

In the years 2004-2005, Columbian painter Fernando Botero worked on a series of paintings named Abu Ghraib. Ever since the photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison were published in 2004, this name came to symbolize a policy that endorses abuse and torture in the name of justice. The hypocrisies around the events in Abu Ghraib prompted the artist to paint this cycle. US museums simply disregarded these works during Botero exhibitions. When liberal Berkeley University finally showed this cycle, Botero donated the entire series to the university in gratitude. In the exhibition “Botero”, in Bank Austria Kunstforum, “Abu Ghraib”, the outraged artist’s cycle on human brutality, will be on display until January 15, 2012. (wh/ca)

[7:51 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

“When you start a painting, it is outside of you. By the time you finish, you are already inhabiting it.”

The history of art belongs to those who have learned to see differently; those who have made visible what is hidden. The artist envisages the object, and presents it in a form which allows for immediate recognition of the message. The energy and emotion that flow into the picture become an intuitive experience, as occurs with the erotic friction between reality and art in Fernando Botero’s oeuvre.

He shows edible painting, the still lifes and their fruits being juicy and appetizing. However, a huge yellow pear with a wiggling worm in it gives an almost menacing impression, while the sweetness of the colours and the iconic stiffness of the portrayed figures can have an unsettling effect on the viewer.

The current exhibition on the Bank Austria Kunstforum is structured by topics, from nudes to still lifes, bullfights (of which Botero is an expert) to portraits and paraphrases on the old masters. The artist had studied the masters of the early renaissance and spanish baroque painting in Spain and Italy. In the Prado he discovered Goya, Velazquez and Rubens, he had already been inspired by Picasso as a youngster. A total of 70 painting are on display in the show, the pictures depicting the atrocities committed by US-Soldiers in the notorious Abu Graib prison have been donated by Botero to the University of Berkeley in San Francisco. Perhaps they will inspire artists in this formerly Mexican US-state to follow the path of the political artists Rivera, Orozco or Siqueiros.

Botero’s imagery is not based on direct observation of the model but on his inner experience of reality, and the intensity of his memory. The figures are not only a result of a visual act by Botero - also gustatory, acoustic, tactile and olfactory perceptions of the artist have been integrated and are transmitted to us via colours, surfaces, forms and every single detail.
The seemingly tasteless vivid colours and the folkloristic character of the motives are mitigated by an austere composition and a soberly structured geometry. By means of this quasi architectural clarity, he opens up a world he has appropriated and created for himself. The province of Colombia has conquered the world of art history. He is the man who takes his tale seriously and makes us laugh with it, but the comedy’s droll camouflage can transform itself into something threatening and tragic.

A „popular“taste, with excesses and strong contrasts nourishes the expansion of the figures’ forms; within an atmosphere of altarpieces, Botero places his voluminous marionettes at will. An innocently proud demeanour lies on the facial expressions of his figures in the group portraits of rural Colombia; they have the appearance of enlarged toys. The dissymmetry and spatial improbabilities are nevertheless governed by an internal logic of this distorted world, and accepted by the viewer. The visual pragmatism and the intentionally crude humour are conspicuous; the almost mischievous innocence of the naïve, presenting itself on a first image level, lures us into a plenty of traps and deceits. The accumulation of precise details and winking motives captivate and delight us, the manipulations of the skilled narrator convey a sense of authenticity - in spite of all the virtuosity.

His art reveals images that are different from the merely visible, they mutate into a perceivable loophole in reality, from which Botero’s chubby figures lean out and come out to us.

The exaggeration has turned us into accomplices in a game in which we play along euphorically. We happily move into this dream scenario – just to find us within a nightmare where the cheerful becomes abysmal. (ca)

[6:53 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

CastYourArt visited the Cyprus-born painter, Cemal Gürsel Soyel, in Vienna, and accompanied him on his way to his studio. The resulting podcast shows more than just the streets of Vienna. The walk we take with him leads us down the path of the artist to his painting – both in a literal and a pleasantly ironic sense. (wh/jn)

Of Making Hear.

[24:37 min] download for: mobile, computer and iPod | send feedback

As a media artist, Thomas Wagensommerer explores the sound faculty of electronic instruments (the existence of sounds produced by it) as well as the possibilities of sound design in the era of the Web 2.0. At the same time, the artist constantly reflects on the composition process and aims for an expansion of our conception of what we call hearing.

In his conception, Thomas Wagensommerer says, his work is less about making the audience listen to a message but rather an intent to disclose the process of hearing through his endeavour. Silence as well as the use, the eligibility and the adequacy of sound, its sculptural character and composability, are realms of testing not only for himself, the artist and composer. Whoever wants to make hear has to include others into the process of creating sounds, and have it experienced and understood as an positive activity. Thus, besides solo works and a number of co-operations, there are mainly performative compositions and installations involving the audience to be found in the oeuvre of the artist born in 1987.

Max Kickinger met the artist and composer in Vienna and produced this feature for CastYourArt. (wh)

[9:42 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

He visited André Breton, the writer and theoretical head of surrealism in Paris – this was the moment he turned away from surrealism. Together with Maria Lassnig, he is considered the originator of informal painting in Austria, his works are on display in the main museums on the entire globe. The road to success has at times been stony, tells Rainer, whose first solo exhibition took place in the St. Stephan gallery of Monsignore Otto Mauer in 1955. The beginning of his overpaintings for instance were not based upon any philosophical concepts, but were simply a consequence of his lack of money to buy new canvasses. Instead, the artist resorted to painted canvasses - pictures from the flea market. They were cheaper to buy.

The artist has never been indifferent to the canvas he used. This is why, from the outset, he used to communicate with the original works he overpainted – no matter if it was a painting from the flea market, the work of a colleague, facsimiles of famous predecessors or photographs of himself. In a way, says the artist, he got married to the underlying work in this symbiotic task, and always showing respect for it. A sensitivity which was painfully absent, felt the artist and professor at the academy of fine arts in Vienna, when an unknown person broke into his office in a night time burglary, destroying important paintings there. As a response to this incident and due to the lack of support by the academy regarding the investigation, he decided to retire in 1995. He has not entered the academy ever since.

The disrespect was offending. The celebrated overpaintings of his own photographic portraits, the “Face Farces” and “Body Poses” he started in the late fifties, nevertheless demonstrate that he is able to convey esprit and irony. This examination of himself has its origin in the fact that his facial expression takes on a life of its own, when he is immersed in his work – as can be observed on musicians at times. He noticed this one day and took the decision to experiment with his own physical expressivity. On a personal level, the overpainting of his own image on photographs led him to be more casual about himself; artistically he aimed to accentuate essential traits and dynamics of a picture with a few strokes.

His artistic approach is absorbed, intuitive, and quick. Usually the artist works on several pictures simultaneously. As he says, the line where painting ceases to strengthen and gets weaker itself is a very thin one, and by working only for brief periods at a time on the pictures, he avoids overstepping this line.

There have been phases where his overpaintings were more extensive, exposing only very few distinctive areas of the underlying surface. The accentuations he carries out are not aimed at unambiguous clarity, but rather at opening up the space of codifications. Art has nothing to explain, nor is it an enigma to be solved – as such it would lose its charm at once. Art has to stimulate and keep open, says Rainer, and as Karl Kraus put it: An artist is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. (wh/ca)

[0:45 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

Role models – role playing

The masquerade and its staging are a challenge for the protagonists. However, since long ago performance has not been limited to the stage and spotlight anymore. It has freed itself from the narrowness of the theatres, playhouses, cinemas, television shows and magazines and has stepped out into real life. In the course this liberation, acting has been transformed into role playing. Its protagonists are we.

The more the boundaries between the world of show venues and the world of everyday life become blurred, the more difficult it gets to restrain the role playing. The opportunities for unmasking the self have suffered greatly in the last decades. Authenticity has become hyper-real, and unadulterated pureness a game that is rated highly on its own account. We continuously change roles and search for strong role models which would endure and have the potential for extra time.

By means of photographs, graphic art, video works and installations, the exhibition “role models – role playing” in the MdM Salzburg shows art illustrating the designing of role models and the testing of role plays. From the Tableaux vivants of the 19th century, to the identity concepts of modern art in the context of the gender debate, to the self-staging as artists and living works of art – the history of staging in art is made visible. On display in the exhibition curated by Toni Stooss, Esther Ruelfs und Veit Ziegelmaier are, among others, works of Marina Abramović, Candice Breitz, Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman, David LaChapelle and Andy Warhol. (wh/ca)

Until October 2011, in its ongoing exhibition, the Architekturzentrum Wien displays works and a room-sized installation of the Russian artist and architect Alexander Brodsky.

[7:44 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

At the beginning of his career, Alexander Brodsky is part of the “paper-architecture“ movement even though at that point, at the beginning of the eighties, there is no movement in the true sense yet. The notion “paper-architecture” rather expresses a typical limitation to architectural creativity in the Soviet Union of the time: Young architects who would refuse to fit in with the established architecture system would have no means to carry out their projects, and therefore design only for presentation or indeed just for the paper.

This kind of architectural existence only begins to form a movement when first signs of openness become perceptible in the Soviet Union. Suddenly young architects receive permission to participate in architecture competitions abroad, primarily in Japan. As the architect tells, the competitions were of a conceptual nature as well, the contributions however received more public attention and awards. This paved the way for “paper-architecture” as a movement.

For the architect, the dissolution of the Soviet Union marks the beginning of an era of travelling abroad. He exhibits in the Netherlands, Germany and other European countries. He lives in New York for four years. On his return in 1994, he finds that his home country, to which he still feels strongly connected, has changed. It is the moment when Alexander Brodsky begins to design architecture to be actually constructed.

As a constructing architect, Brodsky also refuses to conform to the Russian architectural mainstream of the new era - architecture as accomplice of a housing boom, completely changing cities, -architecture as expression of economical megalomania. These approaches are alien to him. In fact, on his quest for a different Russian identity he rather develops a “radically authentic personal position, exemplary for the western here and now as well.”

The reviews, the opinions of colleagues, as well as the attention of the public indicate that his architectural and artistic panache beyond pretentiousness receives wide approval in the western world. His works are shown in artistic contexts, in biennales and exhibitions. He is invited to work artistically in locations frequented by hundreds of thousands daily, such as the underground railways of St. Petersburg and New York. And he builds: houses, restaurants, apartments, pavilions, cafes…

His works are of high aesthetic and visual quality – works of art to be actually utilized- and often they convey a thoughtfulness, a time factor of fugaciousness, of a recovery of objects, and of a historicity often absent in an architecture trapped within the scope of technical capabilities.

His pavilion, assembled out of ice cubes that melts in spring and is built on a frozen lake becomes an allegory of disappearance, with everything around flourishing economically. A club restaurant built by him in Moscow has the spatial proportions of a Soviet-era council flat, its walls consisting entirely of window frames from local waste sites. Thus he creates space for entertainment and exuberance, embedded within a space of the rejected and the refused.

Whenever he is designing contemporary works he is concerned with ruins of bygone times, with things passing by – due to the fact that he is unable to understand modern architecture: “ I felt …a tender love for all classical architecture but at the same time dreamt of loving contemporary architecture as well” he says, and: “in the end I succeeded”.(wh/ca)

[6:55 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

„I will now reveal the secret: I am talking about an important artist“ (Christian Ludwig Attersee)

Random. Clean Cuts. The works of the new series by the artist Alexander Steinwendtner contain an essential and fascinating quality of human endeavour, referred to as making art: precise artistic expression arises stems from an artistic attunement, not quite definable and therefore not attainable in an exact manner.

In other words, the artist is able to specify what falls to him and that art is not simply mastered, but in fact created. Quality, says Alexander Steinwendtner, arises from a time that he is somewhat unable to define. Therefore the artistic agenda is to venture into the undefined, in order to reach the concept.

In the exhibition „Random. Clean cuts.“, CastYourArt presents a series of new works by the Salzburg-based artist Alexander Steinwendtner. The works, paintings and objects are composed of wooden panels painted with varnish and oil, into which the artist applies precise sections – Clean Cuts. Due to the rigorous geometry generated by the placement of the cuts, the works display a fascinating spatial depth and a plasticity reminding of sculptures.

Alexander Steinwendtner completed his artistic education at the University for applied arts in Vienna. He was a pupil at the master class far painting, tapestry and animation film under the guidance of Christian Ludwig Attersee. His works have been on display in various solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the US. Alexander Steinwendtner lives in Salzburg and works in Adnet, in the former forge of a marble quarry. (wh/ca)

Opening: Tuesday, 28 June 2011 | 7.00 - 10.00 pm
Exhibition: 29 Jun 2011 - 29 Jul 2011 | Mo-Fr 1.00 pm - 7.00 pm
Location: Gumpendorfer Straße 55, 1060 Wien/Vienna

[7:46 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

“The human being forgets that it was him who produced the images in order to use them to find his bearings. He is unable to decipher them anymore and from then on lives in function of his own images: imagination has turned into hallucination.” (Vilem Flusser)

Polanszky’s works resemble a language und avail themselves of a sequence or composition of signs and symbols, but without directly reverting to concepts and without giving a direction to the relationship between cause and effect, leaving open which one is cause and which one effect. Reality as a principle is replaced by the performance of reality, including our capacities and mechanisms of representation and interpretation.

For Polanszky his art is a research technique for an inquiry into human nature, by exploring the boundaries of potentialities and possible action without determining goals and purposes – hence the disarrangement, the aleatoric connections, or, amounting to the same, contingency and exception, pure turbulence becoming poetry.

Within us, the transformation of the fictional into the real is being triggered, from the moment of the works’ creation up to the present, within a space that becomes physically tangible. The narration continues, but Polanszky adds a moment of void, a blank space. In this way the reception turns into a subjective experience by producing a meaning, the viewer becoming a co-author of this narrative. The fiction is continued within reality, and a reconstruction of the cognitive experience is being made possible.

The relationship between the illusory space of painting and the physical presence of sculpture in Polanszky’s oeuvre, this fortunate uncertainty oscillating between experiment and mastery, between structure and chaos, conveys a presence that is neither defined by one nor the other.

The bricolage of dismantling and reassembling, generating works “in potentiality” which are in a constant process of transformation, the fragmented time, surfaces and images: In all his fragmented oeuvre, Polanszky seems ultimately to investigate on painting and its language, time and again exploring its formal means.

At this point, interpretation or rather translation of the intention becomes fundamental: the reception and spontaneous interpretation of a work of art reveals itself to silent lecture or a mute inner vision. Not individual features, but the entirety of the composition connects to the recipient – by the immediacy of an unrepeatable experience of a nameless aura, continuing to keep its secret and its mysteriousness.

As far as the artist remains the subject, we are but mere visitors of his artistic universe and find out that our cognition is illusory: we stand before an existential emptiness, devoid of transcendence. After this experience of despair and the acceptance of the inevitable doom, we find ourselves in a state of an exhausted presence of mind – perhaps, with some luck, a deafening silence surges in our mind.

No intellect exists without representation; even the blind man visualizes his world in images. Our intellect cannot grasp anything that does not appear before our inner eye, “we only see what we view” (Merleau-Ponty)

The gaze learns while looking, by permanently carrying out comparisons in order to find himself in what he sees – every depiction, every image must therefore remain provisional.

The eye and the intellect are accomplices in the depiction of the seen, while inescapably remaining bound to our earthliness and corporeality. We have no other choice but to resort to our eye and intellect in order to attain at least a partial truth – but when this happens and eye-intellect succeeds in catching a glimpse of reality, the veil is brutally ripped off and the idyll destroyed.

[7:46 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

Interview with Jasper Sharp, the curator of “The Hour Blue” exhibition of Jan Fabre at Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna

[9:36 min] download for: mobile, computer and iPod | send feedback

Jan Fabre is an artist we can safely describe as a multidisciplinary all-rounder. He is a painter, graphic artist, stage director, choreographer, lighting designer, author and editor – drawing from all fields of creativity: Arts, sciences, philosophy, literature, religion…nothing escapes him.

As first living artist and as a conclusion of his trilogy (2006 in Antwerp, 2008 in the Louvre), the exhibition in the picture gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna will display 26 works of his series “The Blue Hour”. They are distributed in the premises of the picture gallery until August 28, showing the collection of paintings in a new perspective.

Fabre reflects on the old master’s works as well as on the history of painting, and on the meaning of the museum as an institution.

The exhibition deals with the evolution of drawing as a means of expression and the question what a drawing is, what its surface actually is. The works of the series have been produced with blue BIC-ballpoint pens, they revolve around the topics of metamorphosis and rebirth, and they are drawn, or hatched on paper, canvas, a large silk drapery or three-dimensional objects.

In the halls and chambers of the picture gallery, Fabre enters into a dialogue with the collections’ masterpieces; he reacts to Rubens, the Italian masters, German painting, and the Dutch, especially to Brueghel. According to him, the great paintings evolved from first sketches, his pictures are therefore something like the “reverse side of the old masters”.

His transcending subject is the blue hour. A tribute to his great-grandfather, the entomologist and writer Jean-Henri Fabre, who coined the term in his writings, describing the transitory phase of dawn, where the nocturnal animals calm down and the birds are not yet singing – a mystical moment of silence and transformation, between dream and consciousness: this is the realm where his oeuvre comes from, says Fabre.

He still sees in himself the sleepless child, imagining strange creatures in the cracks of the room’s ceiling. As he says, the gesture of drawing and the rhythm of its movement put him into a state of trance-like concentration, in which he conjures up his visual worlds and gives them their form.

On display between, above, under, and even instead of the collections masterpieces, the works of Fabre -loans from public and private collections from all over the world- enter into a fascinating relationship between the contemporary and the historical, the transient and the permanent. In addition to this, there are sculptures of the artist on display in the entrance hall and on the roof (visible from the park), as a further contrast between modernity and history.

In all his artistic endeavours, in fine arts as well as in performing arts, Fabre creates intriguing visual associations, the combination of opposites generating surprising insights – we could describe it as the art of the oxymoron.

“Nowhere is the original vulnerability, sensibility, and fear of a personality that is constantly hiding, deeply emotional, enthusiastic, impulsive, unsettled, and passionate as visible as in the gigantic graphical oeuvre of Jan Fabre, where the empathetic ability of deep, revering, spontaneous, unlimited ability of admiring the enigmatic and where the complete, uncompromising, excessive commitment to the secret of the haunting unknowability of the world is so immediate, so touching and so unconcealed. This exaggeratedness defines the entire poetic domain, from the artistic methodology to the narration, from the intensity of the psychological-emotional involvement to the auratic connotations - intensifying our thirst for adventure and our ability to project, with their poetic allusions to enigmatic events and contexts, to mysterious correlations of human and animal creatures, organic and inorganic formations, and rational and irrational occurrences”, Lóránd Hegyi. (ca)

[1:50 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

Interview with G. Schöllhammer and H. Saxenhuber, the artistic directors of the fair

[24:14 min] download for: mobile, computer and iPod | send feedback

With 47 registrations from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe this CEE´s focus is the largest so far in the history of the “VIENNAFAIR”, including this year such significant positions as the Riga Gallery from Latvia, Plan B and Ivan from Romania, lokal_30 from Poland or Tulips and Roses from Lithuania as well as Skuc and P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E from Slovenia. With Gisich from St. Petersburg,GMG and paperworks from Moscow, the Russian scene shows again a strong presence in Vienna after a long while. With a total of five galleries, amongst these acb and Raday, Hungary is again strongly represented as in previous years. New this year are the Newman Popiashvili Gallery from Georgia and Tengri Umai Gallery from Kazakhstan. Also for the first time in Vienna (present with artists- streichen weil eh klar) are the Jiri Svestka Gallery from Prague, Art Radionica Lazareti and Contemporary Croatian Photography from Croatia.

[8:37 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

Not only in politics, also in the domain of the arts the 1960ies were a decade of worldwide upheaval, the radical changes can also be retraced in the Austrian art scene of that period. At the beginning of the decade, art became in many cases more political and provocative in its statements, drawing on subjects in between the realities of the mundane and the artistic. The convergence of high culture and popular culture has its beginnings in these movements, followed by a fundamental challenge to the previous notion of art.

The subject matters of the paintings of that era often take on daily life; they reflect the reality of the period, promoting and depicting cultural changes. The exhibition offers an interesting extract of these very varied developments from 1960 to 1969. Up to now the MUSA has purchased approx. 4300 works of art dated from 1960 to 1969, from more than 780 artists.

For Bernhard Denscher, head of Vienna department of culture, the MUSA is “a display window for the city’s art”. Due to limited space only 130 works of art are on display in the exhibition.

„All in all, the exhibition stock of the 1960 turns out to be very heterogeneous, with works of very varied importance, nevertheless illustrating the spirit of the time” say the curators of the exhibition, Berthold Ecker and Wolfgang Hilger.

The curators of the exhibition succeeded in reproducing the atmosphere of an era. By displaying different positions about radicalism and adaptation, about revolution and establishment, ambivalences and contradictions become perceptible as ingredients of art.

Unorthodox, provocative behaviour, shock and irritation of familiar customs, breaking taboos and the end of prudish attitudes constituted the counterculture of those times. In the 1960ies, the Viennese actionists provoked with their performances, radically challenging mainstream approaches to the concept of the human body.

Preconceived notions shaped by the taboos and religion of Austrian post-war society were parodied and confronted with alternatives.

The means of confrontation between the established mainstream and its criticism were often interactive and blasphemous; in the act of public painting the dimension of time gained new significance, taking precedence over the material.

Action painting became an integral part of Viennese Actionism and aesthetic experience took precedence over distant contemplation.

For Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Adolf Frohner, confrontation with “informel” painting which seized tendencies of pre-war abstract expressionism was crucial, as much as the performances of the Vienna Group with its experimental forms of recitation.

Another group of artists appeared in 1968 under the catchword of „Wirklichkeiten“ (realities) which was -besides the performance “art and revolution” by the actionists- in the curators’ opinion the most significant event of the decade. Their common traits were, among others, that they painted colourfully, not abstract, and would not adhere to the rules of perspective and bodily proportions.

In the current exhibition the original group of „Wirklichkeiten“ is extended to a larger circle, in order to demonstrate that it is not a group distinguished by a clearly defined style but rather represents significant protagonists of an art which embodies the feeling of the 1960ies.

Regarding the selection of artworks for this show, preference was given to objects which exemplify the new tendencies of the 1960ies in a symptomatic manner. This was inevitable because the proportion of historically significant pieces was larger than in the preceding decade.

The exhibition offers a representative cross-section of the MUSA collection and of an important decade of Austrian art history. (ca)

For the first time, the Bank Austria Kunstforum shows a retrospective of the artist outside of Russia and the Ukraine. There are fifty representative paintings on display, among them main works from the Aivazovsky Museum in Feodosia and the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg that have never been shown abroad.

[9:10 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

As legend has it, he died in his studio with a brush in his hand, 111 years ago. In his exceptionally long life he actually left only this one painting unfinished, out of the estimated 6000 he painted. In his lifetime his works were already marvelled at, admired, venerated – and purchased.

He is regarded as the most successful Russian Romanticist of the 19th century. However, in European art history his name seems almost forgotten. We are referring to Ivan Konstantinovitch Aivazovsky, a painter who was capable like no other to bring light, air and water onto the canvas in a most realistic manner.

Aivazovsky was born 1817 in Feodosia, a small seaport on the Black Sea as a child of Armenian refugees. As a small boy at first he displayed his artistic talent on the walls of his neighbourhood, making do with the charcoal of a samovar. After successful studies in Saint Petersburg he went on study trips throughout Europe. From the outset, his oeuvre was met with enthusiasm. On of his admirers was the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner. Turner called his views of Naples the work of a genius.

Just like Turner, Aivazovsky did not paint outdoors but after sketches he made in his studio. These sketches often did not consist of more than a few outlines; he recalled most of the content from his memory. Considering this fact, the accuracy of his city views of Constantinople, Venice or Naples is even more astounding. Not only did he depict architecture in a remarkably realistic way but also images of moonlit landscapes or sunrises, some of which he had not even witnessed.

Reportedly Aivazovsky had an encounter with a contemporary at the Biarritz coast. It had been a foggy day and Aivazovsky inquired about the course of the sun. On the following day, Aivazovsky painted the surf of Biarritz with a few strokes, in three different light moods. This pragmatism must have had an almost provocative effect on many a romanticist contemporary of his time. In his case, the suggestion of a personal sensory perception emerges virtually as a readily available recipe.

However, the impact of his paintings is not due merely to his imagination, but essentially originates from the pictorial itself. His rapid working methods and the very thin layers of paint allowed for smooth shadings, creating an almost aquatic transparency and an atmosphere illuminated by a special light. Their visual magnetism and luminosity appeared so uncanny to the visitors of the Paris Salon that they inspected the reverse sides of the paintings for possible light sources.

Ayvazovsky was an exceptional personality of his time, not only in the artistic sense. He used his wealth for charitable purposes and his creative power for modernizing efforts in his hometown Feodosia. Today he is an integral part of Russian history and has his place in all schoolbooks. (ko/ca)

[2:02 min] send feedback

We are going to present our international video and audio productions as well as artworks of the austrian artist Helmut Grill. We would be happy to welcome you at our booth at ArtMonaco11 end of march and … take a look at the videoportrait of Helmut Grill right now. (wh)