Rudolf Stingel, Michael Snow - Recent Works
Mittwoch, 22. Februar 2012 - 19:00 Uhr
secession
Michael Snow
Recent Works
February 23–April 15, 2012
Opening:
Wedesday, February 22, 2012, 7pm
Rudolf Stingel
For more than twenty years, Rudolf Stingel's works have interrogated the concept of painting and expanded its definition. In the 1980s, he demystified the image of the artist as an inspired inventor, which was then still widely held, by publishing a book entitled "Instructions / Istruzioni / Anleitung" that revealed how his abstract paintings were made and included directions enabling anyone to imitate them.
In addition to the classical means of painting, such as paint and canvas, Stingel employs industrial materials like insulation panels, styrofoam, carpeting, and potter's clay. Since the early 1990s, he has used these materials to "carpet" now the floors, now the walls of exhibition rooms, in a significant contribution that has defined the contemporary debate over the relationship between painting and space. Lined with a monochrome carpet or silvery insulation panels, space itself becomes the support medium of "painting," or rather, of monochrome color. The artist's interest in the materials he employs also extends to their specific surface qualities and the ways in which they can be modulated: impressions left on a carpet can easily be obliterated, restoring a tabula rasa sort of state, whereas the graffiti-like engravings in the insulation panels are lasting traces of human interaction.
In 2005, Stingel created a portrait of his gallerist, Paula Cooper, adding this classical genre to his otherwise abstract oeuvre in a new branch of his oeuvre that has since grown into a series of photorealistic self-portraits in shades of gray based on b&w photographs.
At the Secession, Rudolf Stingel presents a project conceived specifically for this context.
Rudolf Stingel, who was born in Meran (IT) in 1956, lives and works in New York (USA) and Meran (IT).
Michael Snow Recent Works
Michael Snow. Recent Works is the first solo show presenting the work of the influential Canadian artist Michael Snow in Austria. The exhibition features selected photographs and film installations from the past ten years that exemplify the spectrum of his art. An experimental filmmaker, painter, sculptor, photographer, and professional jazz musician, Snow has worked in a wide range of media for more than fifty years. His art is defined by his sustained interest in questions of the perception of reality and its eidetic representation as well as the means of that representation itself. Applying a rigorous approach, he examines the structures, processes, and limitations of the various media, often operating in the interstices and exploring one medium from the perspective of another. Each one of his works pursues a specific strategy. The works on display in the Secession address issues including simultaneity in the interplay between image and sound, the plane of projection as the basis for the perception of filmic imagery, beholders' perspectives, and the object status of what photography depicts, or in other words, its realism.
Michael Snow, who was born in Toronto (CA), lives and works in Toronto (CA).
In collaboration with the Film Museum, Vienna