C. Angelmaier, Herbert Bayer, Gottfried Bechtold, Norbert Becwar, Arthur Benda, Martin Bruch, Rosa Brueckl / Gregor Schmoll, Clegg & Guttmann, Herbert de Colle, Plamen Dejanov & Svetlana Heger, Inge Dick, Gerald Domenig, Andreas Duscha, Thomas Freiler, Padhi Frieberger, Bernhard Fuchs, Seiichi Furuya, Walter Gamerith, Robert Gruber, Eva Grubinger, Manfred Grübl, Harald Gsaller, Ernst Haas, Maria Hahnenkamp, Robert F. Hammerstiel, Matthias Herrmann, Richard Hoeck, Kathi Hofer, Christine Hohenbüchler, Edgar Honetschläger, Dieter Huber, Franz Hubmann, Gerhard Jurkovic, Werner Kaligofsky, Eleni Kampuridis, Leo Kandl, Barbara Kapusta, Herwig Kempinger, Erich Kofler Fuchsberg, Peter Kogler, Paul Kranzler, Richard Kratochwill, Elke Silvia Krystufek, Erich Kuss, Heimo Lattner, Paul Albert Leitner, Branko Lenart, Ernst Logar, Dorit Margreiter, Michael Mauracher, Ursula Mayer, Michael Neumüller, Martin Osterider, Michael Part, Helga Pasch, Hermes Payrhuber, Pascal Petignat & Martin Scholz-Jakszus, Friederike Pezold, Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Barbara Pflaum, Cora Pongracz, Ferry Radax, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Ruhm, Didi Sattmann, Christoph Scharff, Klaus Scherübel, Alfons Schilling, Michael Schuster, Günther und Loredana Selichar, Lucie Stahl, Hermann Staudinger, Alexander Stern, Ingeborg Strobl, Octavian Trauttmansdorff, Herwig Turk, Nadim Vardag, Christian Wachter, Peter Weibel, Manfred Willmann, Erwin Wurm, Michael Ziegler, Heimo Zobernig; curated by Severin Dünser and Axel Köhne

Photography is everywhere. Long since recognized as an artistic medium, it has also become a popular vehicle of communication. This exhibition shows us photography just as we encounter it in everyday life: as an unordered flood of images.

Three leitmotifs underlie the selection of works: the people and the things that surround us, and the lens between them (in other words, photography itself). The photographs selected pose questions regarding the status of the image, the aura of the photo, the objectivity of the camera and its construction of reality, as well as the specifically Austrian in photography – questions that must be answered face to face with the images.

Photos is a reduction to the essential. The subjects themselves stand front and center, and they must account for themselves – especially whether they have something to tell us here and now, regardless of whether they were created in the 1930s or last week. The show is about pictures and the potentials of a force that reigns beyond what can be expressed in words.

This exhibition has been culled from those collections that best reflect the work of Austrian photographers: the Artothek des Bundes, the federal photographic collection of the Austrian Gallery of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art Salzburg, and of course that of the Belvedere itself.

The exhibition catalog can be ordered here.

The exhibition seems blocked even before entering the space, as a canvas appears to be floating across the doorway. Indeed, the visitor has to pass fairly closely to a painting to go into the show, a painting that in actual fact is part of a series rather than a barrier. It is a five-part cycle with pictures not hanging on the wall in the usual way but protruding into the room, attached to the wall along their thin edge. The hanging intensifies the presence and materiality of these works and arranges them in succession as opposed to side-by-side. This defined sequence forms a narrative, a first indication that a fundamental subject in this exhibition is time.

For time is also a theme of the paintings. Rita Vitorelli’s starting point was a series entitled The Course of Empire, completed in 1836 by the American landscape painter Thomas Cole. The titles of the paintings can be read on the reverse on the canvases: The Savage State, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction, and Desolation. They show a distinctly American landscape but not a specific empire. In a clear narrative and slightly varying landscape views they trace the development of civilization from barbarism to its heyday and then violent devastation followed by demise, thus alluding to the biological nature of history and the transience of its epochs. The cycle takes place over the course of a single day, as can be seen from the position of the sun.

Vitorelli’s aim was to translate Cole’s subject matter into contemporary form, successively paring down the vivid originals in preliminary works before finally transferring her studies to canvas in a single session. There were no corrections or retouching, leaving the picture’s structure and the performative moment clearly visible in this temporal sequence of canvas, primer, drawing, and paint. It concerns the moment when the work is realized that, for all its lengthy preparation, runs no risk of losing any of its lightness and fluency. These are paintings that are certainly not easy to digest. They have no center and seem to have been composed around the edges, thus tending to forfeit some tension, but it is in the detail that their appeal lies – indeed the style of installation calls for its close scrutiny. 

The abundance of images projected onto the walls at the other end of the exhibition space has a very different effect. These images have been produced using digital tools – not the best high-end image processing programs but low-tech tools capable of little more than aligning pixels. They were made in three different ways: Firstly, observing the motif without looking at the screen, secondly watching the drawing hand with only a mental image of the motif and the screen turned away, and thirdly drawing with just a mental image of the motif while looking only at the screen. Vitorelli thus disconnected the classic process of drawing that combines simultaneously looking at the hand and emerging drawing while glancing at the motif. The artist has been producing such images for a long time and she then superimposes them in different ways. For this exhibition she compiled the drawings into a slideshow with amateurish transitions further underlining the caricature quality of these works. This translates traditional hanging into a sequence, bearing in mind all the issues of rhythm to which spatial installation aspires.

On display in the lower level courtyard in front of the 21er Haus entrance there is a poster series designed by Rita Vitorelli and Dan Solbach. This too works with the notion of the calculated coincidence. Solbach combined various drawings to create a poster and the twenty-seven posters were then arranged by posterers. 

This haphazard moment, which is not dissimilar to the circulation of images on the internet and how we interact with these, undermines the individual painterly gesture and replaces authorship with creative complicity, although a digital signature style can still be detected. Classic questions about painting, concerning issues such as composition or representation, are juxtaposed here. And yet when facing the question about where the inflationary and immaterial image will lead painting, we still look to painting to find our bearings. The Course of Empire is indeed to be read as a commentary on the status quo: painting in a ruinous state but within the context of an ever-recurring cycle.

Rita Vitorelli was born in 1972 and lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. Her most recent exhibitions include: Very abstract and really figurative, Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna (2012); The Happy Fainting of Painting, Zwinger Galerie, Berlin (2012); Die/Der Würfel/Le Dé (III), COCO, Vienna (2012).

Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0

Noële Ody makes sculptures. They often look like minimalist, even industrial structures and follow a logic that lies beyond pure aesthetics. Their functional appearance is not meant as a sculptural gadget, but is a central element: most of them process-oriented, they always seek to involve the spectator and both adapt to situations and create new ones.

Ody’s exhibition in the 21er Raum looks like a waiting room. It is a room within a room: a railing surrounding the walls, benches in the middle with a book on them, and a drink vending machine. The double railing encircles the room, ending in two oversized hands on either side of the entrance. This work shares the title of the exhibition Embrace the Shit and literally embraces both the other works and the visitors. Ody created the installation especially for the exhibition, making everything except for the nuts and bolts by hand and then painting it in shiny black lacquer. The drink vending machine is called “Hallo” and has its own story to tell. Ody hired it and installed it in the sculptors’ studio at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts in Kurzbauergasse, providing drinks for people working there. Similarly, at Ve.Sch Kunstverein in Schickanedergasse she often placed it in the exhibition space at evening events. Now in the 21er Raum, it serves both as a pedestal for two hands and a machine so visitors can quench their thirst. Benches titled Coretto al Banco have been placed beside the machine. Ody made these for the restaurant Victus und Mili in Neustiftgasse. Placed upon them there is a Book of Bills documenting the financial side of the exhibition.

Based on the many “Book of + noun” titles, this amasses receipts for the work the exhibition required without passing any judgment. The railings with the giant hands were produced and the bills paid for from institution funds. The benches were commissioned and are under suspicion of being labeled “design.” The beer vending machine was bought on hire purchase and paid off during the exhibition. It represents one extreme: the real deal. You put money in and a drink comes out – arguably the most direct of transactions. The benches, too, are the result of a direct transaction based on work rendered paid at an hourly rate. Only the economic status of this product is uncertain, as it could have been manufactured more cheaply and its character as both functional object and artwork becomes even more blurred by its integration in the exhibition. 

These conceptual backgrounds in production conditions accompany the exhibition and are juxtaposed with the sculptor’s approach to problem solving. The relationship of form to space and people and the surface fetish, which can scarcely be overlooked, are characteristic sculptural qualities in Ody’s work. It is just as important to mention how the artist plays with visitors, offering them an incentive to stay longer and appreciate cycles intrinsic to art.

What is art? What does artistic work mean and how do artists define themselves through this? These are questions that Noële Ody neither can answer nor wishes to. She calls her exhibition Embrace the Shit, dons a party hat and does a dance for us.

Noële Ody was born in Starnberg, Germany, in 1982 and lives and works in Vienna. A selection of recent exhibitions: Bussi Baba, Elephant Art Space, Los Angeles; Grundfrage, CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2013); caprihosenzeit (with Gabriele Edlbauer), VMU art gallery 101, Kaunas; Wir treffen uns am Abend, Galerie Kamm/COCO at Rosa, Berlin (2012).

Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0

Currently, the odds for painting are anything but favourable: art is presently negotiated post-ideologically, post-categorically, and post-classificatorily. It is produced in a post-avant-garde fashion and in post-studio practice. “I’ll be off then,” art whispers to modernism while it checks on Facebook where the town is being painted red. So what has happened? The belief in an artist’s genius already disappeared from the scene in the 1960s, and since the late 1990s it has become extremely difficult to agree on least common denominators when it comes to ideas and ideals. Instead, the motto is “anything goes”. In any event, it now takes the greatest effort imaginable to discuss the individual art disciplines separately from each other – artists stopped limiting themselves to a single medium, let alone a permanent studio, a considerable while ago. Under these prerequisites, one would assume, the endeavour of painting should long have been dismissed.

Yet today the very contrast between our daily lives, permeated with digital media, and the physical world seems to make painting attractive again. It is no longer expected to represent reality and is therefore above any suspicion of manipulation. And, what is more, it has remained direct and authentic. It is the actual proof for the existence of an acting subject: it seems that through it one is able to catch a glimpse of a paint-smeared artist’s psyche. As nostalgic as this understanding of painting may be, the desire for closeness appears to be all the more real. Nevertheless painting seems to embody all the resentments one might harbor towards art today: it is like a poor parody of art. These are the circumstances under which art is produced nowadays, especially that of Vittorio Brodmann.

His paintings are small, rather not meant to be viewed from a distance, and they depict anthropomorphic creatures. Would it be necessary to assign them to a genre, it would probably be fantasy – if only because of the colors. His characters walk, lean, sit, look around, stand upright, and recline within a picture’s space, with figurative and abstract elements creating an equilibrium between the respective pictorial worlds. The artist produces little narratives with his protagonists making use of the space of color as a stage for totally ordinary postures.

An exaggeration of everyday life to the degree of dysfunctionality is the specialty of daily cartoons and comic strips. It can hardly be overlooked that Brodmann has appropriated their language. His artistic practice relies on comedy and is potentially linked to slapstick. Situation comedy always requires a space for action – in Brodmann’s art, this starts with equating the figures depicted with painterly gestures and extends as far as performance, which the artist increasingly allows to accompany his pictorial work. He has thus begun to enlarge the sum of gestures referred to as painting.

Within the pictorial space as such, though, he limits himself to painterly narration. His anthropomorphic figures are character heads one readily associates with certain traits. The colors also leave room for speculative conclusions as to the states of mind of the figures and the artist behind them. The artist suggests and imitates emotional worlds that encourage interpretation.

Brodmann plays with the allegations made towards expressive painting and with the expectations towards the medium in general. He exaggerates the gestures of painting in order expose them as projections. He does not paint stereotype paintings, but uses clichés from the everyday life of art as a meta-motif.

The representation of creatures in combination with the display of gestures related to them results in pictures that do not give an atmospheric impression, but rather appear to be characters themselves, with their own peculiarities. They are complex types presenting the various aspects of their personalities. In fact, they are nothing but the wider circle of friends one primarily perceives via postings on the Internet.

In the end, Brodmann’s fantastic images subsume the essence of what painting is capable of accomplishing today: they are friable in their presentation of reality and at the same time representative in their reference to a system of visual signifiers. 

Vittorio Brodmann, born in Ettingen (Switzerland) in 1987, lives and works in Vienna. Most recently, his works were shown at the Leslie Fritz Gallery, New York (2013), the CEO Gallery, Malmö (2013), the Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich (2012), Graff Mourgue d’Algue, Geneva (2012), the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg (2012), the Kunsthalle Bern (2012), the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2011), the Kunsthaus Glarus (2010), the Galerie 1m3, Lausanne (2010), and New Jerseyy, Basel (2009).

Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0

Black culture, hip hop, basketball: these are the elements from which Mathias Pöschl forms his exhibition you must learn at the 21er Raum. The title derives from a song by KRS-One, who also uses the pseudonym The Teacher in calling out for struggle against the discrimination of Afro-Americans. Gil Scott-Heron also makes an appearance in the exhibition; as one of the inventors of spoken-word performance, he was known for concerts reminiscent of lectures on social issues. The title of a 1992 song by Eric B. & Rakim has also been integrated in the exhibition: Don’t sweat the technique is a reminder not to waste time on the details. Right next to it is a picture of shoelaces, whichappear three times in the exhibition as a unifying element. They are red, black and green after the colors of the Back-to-Africa movement founded by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. These are also the colors dominating the exhibition as a whole, while the shoelaces themselves reference another figure: Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Beginning in 1990, he played basketball in the NBA under his original name Chris Jackson, which he changed upon converting to Islam in 1991. The basketball player became more widely known on account of his refusal to stand for the American national anthem, and also on account of his style. According to sport theorists, he played like a white man – allegedly whites, in contrast to blacks, play less creatively but more precisely, because they tend to do more of their training alone. Abdul-Rauf trained alone because he has Tourette syndrome. And it was on account of this condition that it took him forever to tie his shoes. Pöschl is dealing with issues like time and order in disorder, a parallel to the Minimal Art of the 1960s and to Robert Smithson’s concept of entropy. This artist appears as a quote at many points, and he is set in relationship with sociopolitical content, for instance when Pöschl forms a (basketball) hoop out of Smithson’s Heap of Language, or when he relates the theme of mirrors and glass to photos of shot-out storefront windows in the context of the Black Panthers. The artist lets the organization’s female icon, Kathleen Cleaver, collide with Wade Guyton’s Color, Power & Style, while also stylizing pictures of the Nation of Islam in allusion to the reduction of their member’s surnames to an X.

Mathias Pöschl employs characteristic forms of Minimalism in describing a subcultural system. He translates into sculptural qualities ideas like striving against entropy, perfectionism, the development of structures, pivot leg and free leg, enduring to raise endurance, or the methodical doing-one-thing-after-another of training practices. Mixing the political and the cultural, he makes from them the entity of a literally social sculpture. And yet at the same time he goes against the grain of Minimal Art’s pretenses relating to the absolute. The attempts at producing order miss the mark in the end, dissolving into an unstoppably advancing entropy.

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni is not the title of this exhibition, but of the series from which the works on display at the 21er Raum derive. The phrase is a palindrome, meaning the same when read from left to right or right to left: “We wander in circles at night and are consumed by fire.“ The exhibition, too, makes us move in circles, among several lines of narrative.

It is obvious that most of the photographs on view were not made during Susanne Kriemann’s residency in Vienna. They show some vertical reddish rock, the interior of a cavern, and a landscape that seems more or less American. The pictures were taken during a research trip in Texas. The archive of images resulting from this journey is huge, whereas the selection made for the exhibition has been narrowed down and is extremely focused: five landscape views piled on top of each other, showing the region around Barringer Hill. Kriemann’s pictures were taken with the vision in mind of shooting the images of the Barringer Hill photographic collection again in our day. In 1887, a number of minerals were discovered in the region, including fergusonite and gadolinite, both of them rare-earth types. When the Westinghouse Electric Company acquired the patent for Nernst lamps in 1901, the mine became the chief supplier of glowers required for these lamps and made of the rare-earth minerals in question. By 1910 Nernst lamps were already out of date, with light bulbs having found their way into most every household. In 1937 the mine was flooded with water, which now extends beyond Barringer Hill as Lake Buchanan. In the meantime the demand for rare-earth minerals have increased more than ever before. In LEDs they are once again used for emitting light, and neither LCD screens nor plasma displays can do without them. Currently, China is in control of the market for rare-earth minerals and in 2011 delivered 97 per cent of the global production. In the USA, mine sites are presently being redeveloped in order to reduce the degree of dependency on China for the urgently required minerals.

Kriemann herself employed a technology based technique on rare-earth minerals in order to solarize her landscape images – the light of her iPhone in the production of her photographs. For the picture of cave walls, which creates an anthropomorphic impression, LED spotlights illuminating Longhorn Cavern near Barringer Hill were implemented. 

One of the larger pictures was not taken in Texas, but in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. To create it, gadolinite, a radioactive and rare-earth mineral, was used in combination with large-format film, in a process that lasted about 20 days. The artist describes the result as follows: “The stone looks as if it were flying towards you directly from the cosmos. You can truly lose yourself in this image. The cave landscape, on the other hand, looks as if you were able to recognize something but the longer you look the less you know what you see. It’s as if the moment of confusion has prompted you to move in two directions: in the first, you don’t know what you see and try to define it and in the second, you know exactly what you see but get lost and eventually know nothing at all.”

The last picture in the exhibition was also taken during the Texas research trip. It is a digital photograph showing a monolith of red granite. It occurs naturally in the place where it was installed: near Amarillo Ramp, the last land art project by Robert Smithson. In 1973 the artist died in a plane crash when surveying the site, and his wife, Nancy Holt, had the rock installed in this very place.  

Smithson borrowed a term from physics in order to use it for societal and universal phenomena: entropy. According to Smithson, the second law of thermodynamics is the fact that it is easier to lose energy than to conserve it, so that the degree of disorder (in social sciences also referred to as uncertainty) is constantly increasing. He sought to create moments between decay and renewal or chaos and order while everything is subjected to continuous change. 

Entropy also meanders through the exhibition: a mine that is now a lake and a lake that is also a mirror and simultaneously represents the potential of a mine cavern to turn into an eroded landscape with rocks transforming into a kind of sculptural process. That Smithson has slipped into the exhibition metamorphosed into a rock underscores Susanne Kriemann’s almost mystical approach to the subject of entropy. The rare-earth minerals constantly change their appearance and meaning as the exhibition progresses with the invisible radiation of the stones turning into a metaphor for the radiation of the screens by which we are surrounded today wherever we go, and for the many things we only believe to see, but actually do not. 

Living in a permanent exchange of information leads to a constant verification of potential knowledge, which is as repetitive as the impressions of the photographs from the artist’s series, all of which resemble each other closely, although they are not the same. Similarly, the phrase “we wander about in circles at night and are consumed by fire” has different connotations in different languages. “While we stroke the skin of light bodies in order to roam the realms of information, we permanently look into the light. What is in between is glass, so that the devices are actually showcases and the images and texts have already been archived and turned into museum exhibits, i.e., they are no longer alive,” Kriemann maintains. We can only hope that entropy will soon be on the decline again and we won’t end up like moths attracted to light.