Jakob Lena Knebl e Ashley Hans Scheirl per l'Austria

Sarà il duo composto da Jakob Lena Knebl e Ashley Hans Scheirl a rappresentare l'Austria alla prossima Cinquantanovesima Biennale di Venezia, che si svolgerà da maggio a novembre del 2021. 

La proposta di creare nel padiglione una grande wunderkammer di materiale ha affascinato la giuria di selezione. 

Renate Bertlmann Austria

E' stato annunciato che Renate Bertlmann sarà l'artista per la prossima edizione della Biennale di Venezia per l'Austria. 

CS

Dear Ladies and Gentlmen,
Curator Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein announced her nomination for the Austrian contribution at the Biennale Arte 2019 at a press conference in Vienna yesterday. Renate Bertlmann, born in Vienna in 1943, will represent Austria next year at the Venice Art Biennale. "2019 will mark the first time in the history of Austria’s participation in the Venice Biennale that a female artist, namely Renate Bertlmann, will put on a solo presentation at the Pavilion. With this, we are setting an example as a society; an example that is in accordance with the idea of art and examines structural imbalances. In Renate Bertlmann, I have chosen an artist whose methods in terms of both concepts and aesthetics will continue a Venetian art history of provocation in the best sense of the word", explains curator Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein her choice. In Austria, Renate Bertlmann has long been regarded as a leading feminist artist and a pioneer of performance art. In recognition of her groundbreaking work, she was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize in 2017. Her works were presented at large events, such as the Gwangju Biennale, as well as in seminal exhibitions, such as The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern, London (2014), Self-Timer Stories at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York (2014), Renate Bertlmann – Maria Lassnig at Sotheby’s Gallery, London (2017), and Sex Work: Feminist Art & Radical Politics, Richard Saltoun Gallery, Frieze Art Fair, London (2017). The Biennale Arte will take place for the 58th time and will open in Venice on 11 May 2019. Accompanying the preparations for the Austrian contribution, four Biennial Lectures will be held in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Padiglione Austria

BRIGITTE KOWANZ ERWIN WURM

IN THE AUSTRIAN PAVILION AT THE

57th INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION – LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2017

9 February 2017. Christa Steinle, Commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion in 2017, is presenting Brigitte Kowanz and Erwin Wurm, two artistic positions who focus on examining and refining the concept of sculpture in the international art discourse.

With their oeuvres, Brigitte Kowanz and Erwin Wurm – who have both received the Grand Austrian State Prize for their extraordinary work – operate at the intersection between sculpture and architecture. Both react to changes in our perception and experience of space brought about over the past two hundred years by machines, media and new materials.

“Although the most famous phase of Wurm’s work is known as performative sculpture and Brigitte Kowanz’s works as light installations, thus causing them to appear to be worlds apart in terms of designation, they nevertheless work in the same sphere, i.e. on the expansion of the arts ushered in by the rejection of the image. Through the aid of her light installations, Brigitte Kowanz has immaterially redefined space and architecture. With his famous house paraphrases, from ‘House Attack’ (2006) to ‘Narrow House’ (2010), Erwin Wurm has transformed architecture into sculpture, consistently evolving the performative turn of sculpture with his ‘One Minute Sculptures’. Kowanz’s light objects and light spaces with their inherent writing and signs constitute an autonomous achievement for art. With their innovative and independent contributions, Kowanz and Wurm form part of an international movement within the spectrum of an extended concept of sculpture and

space”, as Christa Steinle comments on her aesthetic concept for the Austrian pavilion.

RELATIONS BETWEEN LIGHT, LANGUAGE AND REFLECTION

Brigitte Kowanz’s position in recent art history is a distinctive one. Since the 1980s, her work

has centred on light as an artistic medium that she investigates in relation to space and in

combination with signs, codes and language. She uses light as a means of transcending and adding precision in order to question the conventional concept of image and painting and to hone a new, integrated relation between work, space and viewer. In doing so, carrying on the tradition of reflection on the media, she concentrates on dealing with the fundamental parameters of art: visibility, perception and the production of meaning. Light makes everything visible, but remains invisible itself. Light determines places, but knows no place itself. In “Light Never Stays / Knows No Place / Is Continually Changing / With Its Environment“ (2003/2005), for example, Kowanz explores the unfathomable and ephemeral with analytical passion. Light defies capture, light is in motion, light is everywhere.

The result is conceptual, but poetic objects and installations emerge, in which she also investigates the mechanisms of language. This mutual mirroring of light and language is often accompanied by actual mirrors, that cause reality and virtual mirror image to pervade each other in her exhibition enactments, blurring the boundaries between artwork and viewer.

In her space-forming mirror installations (e.g. MUMOK Vienna 2010), she thus breaks open the boundaries of three-dimensional, architectural space, adding virtual spaces to it.

Kowanz deploys mirrors as a kind of metamedium of visual transfer: by penetrating real space and virtual space, mirrors contain an infinite number of images, transcending and dematerialising the boundaries of space.

Light, language and mirrors constitute the trinity of themes that, combined with each other,

effectively multiply the possibilities of transcending one’s own bounds and mutual penetration to the point of infinity. In these virtual spaces, Kowanz also confronts the viewer with current socio-political issues. In one of her latest pieces, “Maastricht 07.02.92 01.11.93“ (2016), she formulates her concern about the breakdown of the European Union. In this case, the mirror serves, quite literally, as a medium of reflection in which viewers find themselves.

Brigitte Kowanz’s art is conceptual poetry. To her, light as the origin of all life is information, the shaping of space-time.

SCULPTURE AS AN OPEN FIELD OF ACTION

With his sculptures, Erwin Wurm makes a globally acknowledged autonomous contribution to an international trend: sculpture as a form of action. To begin with, Erwin Wurm reinterprets the classical criteria of sculpture – volume, weight, stasis, gravity, form and mass. Instead of the threedimensional object on a plinth, Erwin Wurm focuses on the human being himself and his actions with everyday objects in unusual positions, capturing this minimal period of time in photographs.

Photography and video become a medium of sculpture. With these famous One Minute Sculptures, the audience become participants in designing the sculpture and the sculpture becomes an open field of action. Taking a further step, Erwin Wurm offers the audience various instructions for making sculptures in the museum space, subversively encouraging the individual to take part in social action. By consistently expanding the concept of sculpture, Erwin Wurm demonstrates that he can find an answer to the moods and social conditions of our time in an intrinsically artistic manner – sometimes sublime, often philosophical – in images and objects. Wurm’s concept of sculpture, that

revolves around a wide range of materials and media, makes explicit reference to the traditions of the “Neo-Avantgarde”, in which provocation and venture always played a role.

In other distinct bodies of work, we see the insights gained from the action sculptures transferred back to static objects. One example is “Narrow House“ (2010), an intervention in public space that was on show at the Biennale di Venezia in 2011, a work with which Erwin Wurm spectacularly sums up the confinement of the petit bourgeois family. Here again, Erwin Wurm uses his largeformat sculptures in public space to pan out new options in the aesthetic examination of sculpture and architecture.

All of his works refer to a critical, media-analytical consideration of the concept of sculpture by transcending the boundaries between object and performance, sculpture and photography, between artist and audience. Hence, his works also offer a wide basis for reflection on sociocultural and socially relevant questions. Where once sculpture was above all stasis, since the advent of kinetics it is dynamics. As “social sculpture” (J. Beuys), sculpture is equally action. Wurm turns sculpture into the audience’s form of action.

Christa Steinle has contributed significantly to and enriched national and international

developments in contemporary art through her activities as Director of the Neue Galerie in Graz / Universalmuseum Joanneum or as Austrian Commissioner of the Cairo Biennale in 2004, among others. She has been consistently committed to promoting young artists, critically examining artistic patterns of thought and the art industry.

AUSTRIAN PAVILION, LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2017

Commissioner Christa Steinle

Artists Brigitte Kowanz Erwin Wurm

Heimo Zobernig per l'Austria

Oggi, il ministro della cultura austriaco J.Ostermayer ha annunciato l'artista che rappresenterà l'Austria, sarà Heimo Zobernig.

Press release

The minister of cultural affairs of Austria, Josef Ostermayer, and the commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion, Yilmaz Dziewior, are pleased to announce HEIMO ZOBERNIG as the artist of the Austrian Pavilion - La Biennale di Venezia 2015 at Venice Biennial 2015.

Commissioner: Yilmaz Dziewior

The Austrian Federal Minister of Arts and Culture, Josef Ostermayer, and the commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion, Yilmaz Dziewior, are delighted to announce Heimo Zobernig as the artist of the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015.  

The Venice Biennale counts among the most important art exhibitions and is celebrating its 120th anniversary in the summer of 2015. A look back at the history of artists presented in the Austrian Pavilion so far makes clear the extraordinary breadth and range of the positions displayed there. However, despite the great diversity, the list of participants reads like a retrospective “Who is Who” of the Austrian art scene from the end of the 19th century into the 21st: including, for example, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Arnulf Rainer, VALIE EXPORT, Maria Lassnig, and Franz West.

In recent years, through the choice of positions such as those of Hans Schabus, Dorit Margreiter, Markus Schinwald, and Mathias Poledna, conscious emphasis has been placed on positions which have highly differentiated relationships with the media they use, which range from installations through painting to performance and film. In addition to individual presentations, there were a number of group exhibitions of three or more positions and even the usual restriction to Austrian nationality was occasionally abandoned.

For the Austrian Pavilion in 2015, commissioner Yilmaz Dziewior selected Heimo Zobernig, an artist who has not only influenced the art scene in his own country like almost no other, but is also among the most successful positions in international art discourse and exhibitions. Through his professorship at the Academy for Fine Arts in Vienna, where he has taught for the last 14 years, Zobernig continues to influence subsequent generations. His exhibition activities range from repeated participation in major events such as the Venice Biennale (1988 & 2001), documenta in Kassel (1992 & 1997), and Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997) to extensive individual exhibitions in renowned institutions like the Palacio de Velázquez/Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (2012), Kunsthaus Graz (2013), Mudam Luxembourg, and the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover (both 2014)—to name just a selection from the last three years.

Heimo Zobernig’s work is marked by its high level of precision in terms of both form and content. He often succeeds in involving the observer both intellectually and sensually at the same time. His spectrum ranges from drawing and painting through installation and sculpture to video and spatial settings of a practical nature. Already in his early years, Heimo Zobernig had a firm grasp of how to question the basic premises of art both critically and playfully, by using the exhibition and/or the catalog or book in itself as a medium of his analytical reflection. In this sense, the individual core elements of art became his actual oeuvre. Hence, he exposes the mechanisms of the art system, addresses hierarchies and examines concepts both for their concrete and metaphorical meanings. All the more impressive is how he succeeds in negotiating these issues in the form of what might almost be called classical, apparently autonomous canvases and sculptures, or by means of concrete architectural interventions and installations.

Heimo Zobernig will combine both approaches for the Austrian Pavilion, which is based on a spatial concept by Robert Kramreiter and was built in 1934 by Josef Hoffmann. Both spatial intervention and independent work of art will enter into a combination as equal, reciprocally commentating elements of his Venice contribution. No less than the concrete room, the situation of the Biennale itself is a starting point for Heimo Zobernig’s deliberations. How can a meaningful contribution be made in an environment based on nation-state representations and in which each voice competes for the most attention? What effects make sense in such a context? These questions also play a role in Heimo Zobernig’s concept for Venice. And the Austrian Pavilion, with its equally classical and modern language of form, offers an ideal space for this purpose.

Commissioner Yilmaz Dziewior was born in Bonn and studied art history there and in London. He received his doctorate from Humboldt University of Berlin in 2005 with a thesis on the Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Since 2009, Yilmaz Dziewior has been director of the Kunsthaus Bregenz. Before that, he was director of the Kunstverein in Hamburg and, at the same time, held a professorship of art theory at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. He has also worked as a freelance curator on exhibitions and projects at numerous other locations, including Beirut, Hong Kong, Cairo, Cologne, Limerick and Rovereto. Dziewior has also been active as an art critic and writer since 1991. His articles have appeared regularly in Artforum (New York), Camera Austria (Graz) and Texte zur Kunst (Berlin). He has published more than 50 books and catalogs on 20th- and 21st-century art. In February 2015, Yilmaz Dziewior takes over as director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

Heimo Zobernig

born in 1958 in Mauthen, lives in Vienna.

He studied from 1977–80 at the Academy for Fine Arts Vienna and from 1980–83 at the University for Applied Arts Vienna.

From 1994–95 he was guest professor at the University for Fine Arts in Hamburg.

From 1999–2000, he was professor of sculpture at the Academy for Fine Arts – Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main.

Since 2000, he has been professor of sculpture at the Academy for Fine Arts Vienna.

Since the early 1980s, his work has been shown at numerous exhibitions, including, among others: Villa Arson, Nice (1991); Kunsthalle Bern (1994); Wiener Secession (1995);  Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago (1996); Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (1999); Biennale di Venezia (1988/2001); documenta, Kassel (1992/1997); Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997); mumok, Vienna (2002); Kunsthalle Basel and K21, Düsseldorf (2003); Yearning for Beauty, MAK, Vienna (2003); Biennale of Sydney (2004); Kunstverein Braun­schweig (2005); Artspace, Sydney (2006), Biennale Busan (2006); Galleria Civica, Modena (2008); Heimo Zobernig and the Tate Collection, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (2008); Heimo Zobernig. Total Design, MAK, Vienna (2008);Stellproben, deSingel International Arts Centre, Antwerp (2008); Heimo Zobernig and the Collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Centre of Modern Art, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2009); CAPC, Bordeaux (2009); Le Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009); Austrian Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and Art 2010, Vienna; ohne Titel (in red), Kunsthalle Zürich (2011); Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg / Vienna (2011); Palacio de Velázquez, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2012); Kunsthaus Graz (2013); Mudam Luxembourg (2014); Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2014).

www.heimozobernig.com

Contact

Austrian Pavilion

La Biennale di Venezia 2015

c/o section.a

art.design.consulting gmbh

Praterstrasse 66/7a

A-1020 Vienna

info@austrianpavilion.at

Team

Commissioner: Yilmaz Dziewior

Curatorial Assistance/Project Coordination: Leonie Radine

Public Relations: Kathrin Luz

Production: Katharina Boesch, Christine Haupt-Stummer (section.a)

Team Heimo Zobernig: Maria Huber, Eric Kläring, Georg Petermichl, Michaela Rapp Zobernig

Architecture/Technical Coordination: Troels Bruun, Luca Ugolini (M+B studio)

Garden: Auböck + Kárász Landscape Architects

Graphic Design: Dorothea Brunialti

Website: Leopold Šikoronja

Editing Publication: Katrin Sauerländer

Tax Consultant: Georg Geyer / Kanzlei Geyer & Geyer, Vienna 

Austria with Mathias Poledna

The artist Mathias Poledna will represent Austria at the Venice Biennale in 2013. At a press conference today in Vienna hosted by the Federal Minister for Education, Arts and Culture Claudia Schmied, the selection was announced by Commissioner Jasper Sharp. Poledna will present an exhibition of new work in the Austrian Pavilion.  Born in Vienna in 1965, Mathias Poledna has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2000. His work examines the interconnections between art and entertainment, modernity in architecture and design, the language of film, cinema and the process of image making in our culture. Often informed by extensive research, his projects of recent years have taken the form of minimal and highly evocative film installations that suggest a complex tension between their visceral attraction and concepts circulating around them. Poledna’s work is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; MUMOK, Vienna; and the Generali Foundation, Vienna, among others.  Federal Minister for Education, Arts and Culture Claudia Schmied: “I am delighted to have appointed Jasper Sharp, a young art historian and curator with extensive experience of Venice and its Biennale, to be Commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion in 2013. In his engagement with Austrian art and artists he brings an informed and international perspective. With the selection of artist Mathias Poledna, Jasper Sharp has prepared the ground for the Austrian participation at the 55. Biennale di Venezia, and has chosen an artist with broad, interdisciplinary attributes and a distinct artistic language reflecting culture and its history.”  Commissioner Jasper Sharp: “Mathias Poledna has, for a long time, been recognised within Austria as one of the most gifted artists of his generation. In recent years his work has gained significant institutional recognition on a more international level, with museum exhibitions in both Europe and the United States. I believe that it is the ideal moment for him to take on the challenge of Venice, and together with the team, I look forward to work with him to develop his project for the Austrian Pavilion next year.“  To accompany the exhibition in the Austrian Pavilion, a landmark publication examining Austria’s participation at the Venice Biennale from 1895 to today is currently being prepared. This scholarly, 400-page book will present, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of each individual exhibition, with the help of previously unpublished photographs, plans and correspondence drawn from public and private archives in several different countries. The book will be launched in May 2013.

Office of the Austrian Pavilion La Biennale di Venezia 2013 Schleifmühlgasse 1, 1040 Vienna www.labiennalevenezia.at

NOTES TO EDITORS:

Mathias Poledna, artist Solo exhibitions include: Secession, Vienna (2013); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2012); Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2012); Raven Row, London (with Florian Pumhösl, 2011); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2010); Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2010); New Museum, New York (2009); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2007); Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2006); Richard Telles Fine Art (2005); and MUMOK, Vienna (2003). Recent group exhibitions include: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Warsaw Museum of Modern Art; Musée Rodin, Paris; Secession, Vienna. Poledna also participated in the Yokohama Triennial (2008); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2006); the Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool (2004); the 3. Berlin Biennale (2004), and Manifesta 1, Rotterdam (1996).

Jasper Sharp, commissioner Jasper Sharp (born 1975) is a British art historian and curator. He worked from 1999-2005 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and has lived in Vienna since 2006. He is Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where is currently preparing exhibitions of the work of Joseph Cornell, Ed Ruscha, and Lucian Freud. He is an advisor to the Outset Contemporary Art Fund and curator of the talks programme for the inaugural Frieze Masters in London in October 2012.

il sito del Padiglione Austriaco

E' online il sito del Padiglione Austriaco http://labiennale.at/2011/

Padiglione dell’Austria storia / history

Ora abbandoniamo questo lato dei Giardini per andare oltre il ponte sulla riva opposta si apre una serie di Padiglioni, iniziamo da quello laterale a sinistra, il Padiglione dell’Austria progettato nel 1934 da Joseph Hoffmann in collaborazione con Robert Kramreiter, restaurato nel 1984 da Hans Hollein.

2013 — Mathias Poledna (Curatore: Jasper Sharp)

2011 — Markus Schinwald (Curatore: Eva Schlegel)

2009 — Elke Krystufek — Dorit Margreiter — Franziska & Lois Weinberger (Curatorei: Silvia Eiblmayr — Valie Export)

2007 — Herbert Brand (Curatore: Robert Fleck)

2005 — Hans Schabus (Curatore: Max Hollein)

2003 — Bruno Gironcoli (Curatore: Kasper König)

2001 — Gelitin ( Wolfgang Ganter, Wolfgang Ganter, Ali Janka, Florian Reither, Tobias Urban), Granular=Synthesis (Kurt Hentschläger ,Ulf Langheinrich) (Curatore: Elisabeth Schweeger)

1999 — Ecke Bonk, Peter Friedl, Rainer Ganahl, Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Knowbotic Research (Christian Hübler, Alexander Tuchacek, Yvonne Wilhelm), WochenKlausur (Curatore: Peter Weibel)

1997 — Die Wiener Gruppe (Friedrich Achleitner, Hans Carl Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener) (Curatore: Peter Weibel)

1995 — Coop Himmelb(l)au (Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky), Peter Kogler, Richard Kriesche, Constanze Ruhm, Peter Sandbichler, Eva Schlegel, Ruth Schnel (Curatore: Peter Weibel)

1993 — Andrea Fraser, Christian Philipp Müller, Gerwald Rockenschau (Curatore: Peter Weibel)

1990 — Franz West

1988 — Siegfried Anzinger

1986 — Max Peintner, Karl Prantl

1984 — Christian Ludwig Attersee

1982 — Walter Pichler

1980 — Valie Export, Maria Lassnig

1978 — Arnulf Rainer