Fotogalerie Wien; Projektraum Viktor Bucher; Galerie Krinzinger
Gallery Run: Who’s hanging what at Vienna’s venues
Mar 06, 2012
As long as you feel young at heart, age is just a number. This may be true in the art world as well, but a lower number can mean less creative compromise, as lack of experience can give people inspirational freedom.
Vienna is famous for the artists it has forged in the past, but even they were not always accepted in art circles. Today, some galleries have made a point of promoting the work of young, promising visual artists, giving them a space to make a name for themselves.
Fotogalerie Wien
Inside the WUK on Währingerstraße the Fotogalerie Wien is a non-profit organization promoting artistic photography and new media. Since 1982, it has been dedicated to showing contemporary work in the field and interdisciplinary projects. The team of eight curators concentrates on promoting young and lesser-known artists (both local and international).
In the current exhibition, Mushrooming, four young Austrian photographers take the stage, examining visual space as a concept (Bildräume).
In her series Otto S., Elisabeth Czihak uses the empty rooms of an apartment, wallpapered with a 2009 original motif. The mood is a deserted place where the remnants of former inhabitant Otto S. and the palpable emptiness create space for new stories.
In Galerie Raum, Catharina Freuis’ work is pristine. Collectively imagined gallery spaces, all in white. Flooded with light, they seem eerily perfect, but still real.
Markus Guschelbauer concentrates on outdoor spaces. Using plastic wrap, he changes the perception of the space, or even naturalises the material so that it becomes a native part of the landscape.
The focus of Michael Strasser is the cooperation between people, space and architechture. In his series Domestic Sculpture Garden, he invokes surrealist settings on real-life spaces – the deserted rooms of houses and hotels – using the materials he finds there (i.e. tiles, carpet or wood panelling), building bizarre sculptures that recreate the relationship between space and people.
Fotogalerie Wien
Mushrooming, 5-31 Mar.
9., Währingerstraße 59/WUK
Tue.&Fri., 14:00-19:00, Wed.&Thu.,
12:00-19:00, Sat., 10:00-14:00
(01) 408 546 2
Projektraum Viktor Bucher
This space has helped spark interest in Austria as an international magnet for emerging artists and contemporary visual art. Viktor Bucher wants the irony and fun in art to remain paramount, giving his young, international exhibitors an inspiring space in which to provoke and examine.
Opening on 15 Feb., Sophie Hirsch’s exhibit, titled heut schau ich mir schöne Bilder an damit ich besser schlafen kann (Today I’ll look at pretty pictures so I can sleep better) is a structural texture puzzle. The presumably time-consuming technique of twisting plastic wrap and ropes into larger rope-like braids in various dimensions brings forth a larger-than-life tangle of materials. During her time in South America, where she developed an interest in recycling materials, which has undeniably influenced her media choices.
The Projektraum is refreshingly fun, and the gallery offers coffee to visitors.
Projektraum Viktor Bucher
Sophie Hirsch shows through 17 Mar.
2., Praterstraße 13/1/2
Tue.-Fri., 14:00-19:00, Sat., 11:00-15:00
(01) 212 693 0
Galerie Krinzinger
Founded in 1971, Gallery Krinzinger was originally inspired by Viennese "Actionism" (a movement from the 1960s and 70s, with Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler). Proprietor Ursula Krinzinger travels to the United States, The United Arab Emirates, China, Japan and India, gathering inspiration and inviting artists to show in Vienna. To Krinzinger, internationalism is key. The gallery has residencies in Hungary and Sri Lanka and specializes in international performance art and body related art.
The current exhibition is by a young artist from Athens named Jannis Varelas. His work chooses fragmentation over the systematic whole, through multimedia drawings, sculptures and videos he approaches the human form symbolically, but with constant permutations, highlighting the constructed and manufactured quality of identity.
In his new works, titled Brown Box and the Broken Theater, the subject is the theatricality of his process, involving children’s TV shows from the 70s and 80s the Theatre of the Absurd, specifically using Jean Genet’s The Maids, and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are Dead. Varelas’ "Brown Box" is a room installation containing sketches, a starting point for the a new project, an imaginary TV-show, creating a philosophical framework in which to enact an absurd existentialist tragic comedy.
Galerie Krinzinger
Jannis Varelas through 9 Mar.
1., Seilerstätte 16
Tue.-Fri., 12:00-18:00, Sat., 11:00-16:00
(01) 513 3006