For the sixth time, Viennafair takes place from May 6th to May 9th, with a focus on Central and Eastern European art. We spoke with Edek Bartz, the artistic director of the fair.

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Viennafair - Part 1 - Focus on CEE Countries

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Viennafair - Part 2 - Focus on Film and Art

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As is the case everywhere, the financial crisis has separated the wheat from the chaff—in the art market as well. In the meantime, the storm is past, and the art market has recovered. Sales records have once again been reported from London, New York, and Paris.

As is the case everywhere, the financial crisis has separated the wheat from the chaff—in the art market as well. In the meantime, the storm is past, and the art market has recovered. Sales records have once again been reported from London, New York, and Paris.

In Vienna, the Viennafair is entering its sixth year. Optimism is the key word at the moment. “Cooperation is the key to success”, as noted in the press release for the most important art fair of Austria. In this case, necessity breeds inventiveness. more »

To Bollywood background music, the blonde sucks on her partners erect prick with relish, then we see how he generously lathers her hairy fanny with soap…a porn movie? No, silly – an art video by Thomas Draschan.

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Why do we constantly need images and want to reflect, recreate ourselves in them? Certainly they allow us to to enjoy insights unattainable to us by ourselves alone. They help us to escape, to distract and to intoxicate ourselves more »

Fiene Scharp’s references to hair and skin confront us with our own corporeality and challenge us to place such normally mundane materials in a new context, not only in art, but in life as well.

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Beauty. Order. Cleanliness. Purity. Perfection. To all of these coveted qualities, hair is a threat, a flaw, a disturbance. more »

Irene Andessner’s self-dramatizations are revivals of historical personalities that utilize memory as a source of reactivation.

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Irene Andessner began her career with painting. She first studied with Emilio Vedova, one of the most important Italian Informal painters, at the Academia di Belli Arti in Venice, and then with Max Weiler and Arnulf Rainer—also a representative of the Informal—at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Andessner encountered paintings by the Italian Renaissance painter, Sofonisba Anguissola, for the first time at an exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The self-portraits fascinated her, more »

We live in a visual age. Our pastimes are often dictated by those things we like to observe, in art galleries, at the cinema, at the zoo. In this surveillance-heavy era, our desire to watch often goes unchecked. Cameras dictate our day-to-day existence, we chase after images that fit our expectations and concepts of beauty, of nature, of gaze-worthiness. Our eyes are trained to seek out, capture, and fix on that which has meaning to us and could be potentially shared.

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But are we critical enough of that which we look at and the position from which we look at it? We set definitions for the subject and the object, we break down the constructs of viewing in the hopes that we don’t fall into a pre-manipulated, voyeuristic trap. Men should not objectify women, tourists should seek the unbeaten path, no one should remain in the position of “the other”. It’s rude to stare. more »

We keep things on hand because they are important to us. We store them. They are available: for example, birthdays of friends, important telephone numbers, and sometimes, works of art. In Vienna, the Museum on Demand (Museum auf Abruf, MUSA) serves this purpose. This museum of the city of Vienna keeps a collection of artworks by artists living in Vienna which is accessible to the city’s residents.

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The collection began in 1945 with an acquisition of watercolors. Since then, the art collection has increased to nearly 20,000 works. They represent the work of Vienna’s resident artists for over a half century. Acquisition, says the present director of MUSA, Berthold Ecker, is the most significant form of support for artists. This has been the cornerstone of MUSA’s artistic policy since the beginning and remains so until today. The city of Vienna purchases about 130 new works of art annually for this collection. Today, one can find works from Franz West, Maria Lassnig, and Erwin Wurm there. more »

At the ripe old age of 35, Francisca Benitez calls herself a “retired architect”. When the Chilean-born artist first arrived in New York ten years earlier, her experience as an architect permanently shaped her view of the city. What she imagined as a creative, intellectually challenging profession, turned out to be an exercise in municipal bureaucracy—much of her work was about interpreting building codes and zoning restrictions, cutting through administrative red tape, and facing the challenges of a complex system of rules, regulations, and protocol.

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All of these obstacles, however, only served to further inform her unique perspective and conception of a sprawling urban landscape. She found that her attention was more and more drawn to those dimensions and spaces around her that may be overlooked, or taken for granted. Informed and inspired by her heroes, Gordon Matta-Clark and Ed Ruscha, she never lost sight of the bigger (or smaller) picture—that the jurisdiction of boundaries, lines, and interactions was a process that was constantly being defined, whether the results followed the modus operandi or not. more »

In his work, the Ecuadorian artist Miguel Alvear works with motifs that originate from the pop culture worlds of South America. He mixes popular icons with historical, mythological, and art historical examples. Sometimes he brings together images from different social environments, combining things that normally try to stand apart due to taste or class distinctions. This approach to art, which ignores the concerns of snobbery and taste, creates friction. In his work, Popular Mechanics, commissioned by the City Museum of Quito, Miguel Alvear reestablishes the flashy, over-the-top style of female Tecnocumbia dancers in the imagery the local public bus drivers like to display on their dashboards. In the end, his work, which is basically reflecting the taste of the public, was not accepted by the museum as a symbol of Ecuadorian culture.

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Miguel Alvear comes from a film and video background. He studied at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion in Belgium and then at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. This cinematic background comes through in his photographs, which are like cinematic still images – Tableaux Vivants, which mix the sacred with the grotesque, the fluid with the static, landmarks with garbage, and, like in the Tecnocumbia songs, religious language with sexually provocative imagery. more »

150 Russian journalists, artists, art collectors, museum curators, and celebrities, 18 pieces of current Russian video art, 1 aeroplane of the airline S7 – named after the 2002 deceased artist Timur Novikov – and 10 hours time. It was the briefest, most extensive, most exclusive, and most celebratory presentation of contemporary Russian video art that foreign countries had ever seen.

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From the organizers, Hans Knoll, a Viennese gallery owner with good connections to the Russian art scene, Pierre- Christian Brochet from the Muscovite B-Comm and Antonio Geusa, curator and recognized authority in all things regarding contemporary video art in Russia, landed at the Viennese airport. more »