Lili Reynaud-Dewar
»I am intact and I don‘t care«
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
March 20 — April 14, 2013
Lili Reynaud-Dewar is interested in identity. Her own one is adressed as well as complex cultural stereotypes. She negotiates mythic, historical and biographic issues on one level while uncovering formal, fictional as well as symbolic potentials. Research and Performance are her tools for that, and the stage-like-ness her language.
Since January, Reynaud-Dewar is artist in residence at the Belvedere. She developed a new series of works in situ, that she now presents at the 21er Raum. An ensemble of furnishings was the output, coming close to an idea of what the artist‘s bedroom might look like.
»What if being an artist led to not having a room of one‘s own but instead many rooms of many owns? Many identical bedrooms decorated with flowers, fruits and liquids. It may also mean making oneself visible and available, always somehow reachable, all in one glance. In my many identical bedrooms I bleed, I dance, I work, I cry. I am no longer private: everything is on view. They say we have entered some time of visibility. With it comes repetition, repetition, repetition. My bedrooms are a cycle, my body is a material accessible via flat screens, my thoughts are recycled. Degradation occurs. Exhaustion occurs. Distraction occurs.
The fountain is a tribute, a monument even, or a metaphor to writers who use their own life as the source of all their work. The ones who reject the novel, the fable, the invention of characters and plots, the protocols of fiction and … the metaphor. One of them, Guillaume Dustan, described his intense -and repetitive- sexual life with accurate precision. He coined a term for the genre he favored : “ autopornobiography”. In his books he also bled, danced, worked, cried. His last book was titled “Premier roman” (First Novel). His first book was titled “Dans ma chambre” (In My Room). My room is dedicated to this book. Although Dustan remained little read, he influenced a generation of french (maybe parisians) young people. His image circulated via some screens -like the one of the tv, where he liked to go wearing a wig- and finally it didn‘t circulate anymore, probably because it had been repeated and degraded in some inappropriate ways. But, if you‘d like to, you could repeat the videos of his tv appearances endlessly on your personal screen.
This bedroom that you are standing in right now is modeled according to its circulation and replication imperatives. Yes it will be repeated. Little variations will occur in the next versions. Maybe a slightly bigger bed, some images of men having sex pasted in the back of the colorful panels, a video screen that folds into some secret cabinet, a fountain of colored ink instead of black. Or maybe it will be repeated as such, like a copy of itself, a little bit ludicrous. And at some point it won‘t circulate anymore, probably because it will have been repeated and degraded in some inappropriate ways.« (L.R.-D.)
Lili Reynaud-Dewar lives and works in Paris and Grenoble. Recent exhibitions include shows at Magasin, Grenoble, 2012; Bielefeld Kunstverein, Bielefeld, 2011 and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, 2010. She has also contributed to many international exhibitions including La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012; The End of Money, Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2011 and Elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009. Her plans for 2013 encompass solo exhibitions at Kunstraum Innsbruck and Le Consortium, Dijon, and participating in the Lyon Biennale.
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
Adriana Lara
»Less is More«
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
September 24 — Oktober 26, 2014
Adriana Lara is interested in the interplay between the things in the world, their appearance, their linguistic and symbolic representation and the problems thereby emerging. Her exhibitions operate like models of the correlations of the order of things and signs, handing over questions of interpretation and meaning to the viewer. She is pursuing a very playful, post-conceptual practice, in which contents are treated on an equal footing with their objects and their sensual experience, realizing works depending on the matter in question in a variety of materials and media.
The realization of artworks is also the focal point of her exhibition at 21er Raum. What does production actually mean, what does it imply? What are the expectations that works should fulfill, and are there promises that artists should neglect? Adriana Lara answers with a series of gestures that are echoing the title of the show. An intervention in spike art quarterly spread over several pages reads as an endless sequence of zeros after a dot, ending with a ‘1’. It represents a cipher which gets smaller (but more expensive as magazine space) as it grows in pages, literally embodying the exhibition title “Less is More”.
Toilet seats arranged at same height along the wall (“Beneath Technology #1-5”) and hung just like one does with art can be interpreted in this direction, too. On the one hand, their presentation as objects of art alludes to Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” and his reduction of production to a concept or idea. On the other hand, the plastic objects refer to the symbolic capital of what is legitimate, the toilet seat as an institutional symbol. Behaving like monochrome paintings or heraldic plaques, the toilet covers sit on quite literal zeros. Their function is reduced to a visual experience, directing the view like a frame to what lies beneath: the wall. While the zeros beneath are always concealed and simultaneously disclosable, the pieces are hung in variable positions along the room, suggesting what lies beneath them at times, obviating them at others.
The architectural intervention in the room titled “The Real Estate” is imitating angled walls found in top floor apartments, former attics reducing the space in a ‘productive’ way, as the artist states. This reductive act of production is complemented with one of the toilet seats hung in the slanted wall that opens slightly by the force of gravity. The decline of the wall is repeated in a photograph next to it. It shows an Austrian porcelain figurine, which went wrong in the oven. It can’t stand on its own, but in this case gravity is subverted with the help of photographic framing. Deprived of its function as a commercial object, the figurine is obsolete and stored for didactic purposes in the Augarten Museum workshop, and yet it is still not exempt of eventual symbolic capital. This transformational moment is also topic of the video that Lara filmed at Kunsthistorisches Museum and describes the trajectory of the archeological Egyptian objects from being found, distributed, unearthed, packed and shipped to its installation at the 19th century museum. Opposite to this, there is a crate, hung like a painting, found in the 21er Haus depot. This also recalls structurally caused transformation processes, except in this case, it recalls the minimum value perhaps equal to the number in the magazine – compared to the Marcel Broodthaers work that it carried inside, now hanging outside, in another exhibition on the same floor of the Museum.
While the relation of production and reduction is explored, the concept of meaning and significance is presented in its exponential condition – frozen in a stage of potentiality.
Adriana Lara was born in Mexico City in 1978, where she lives and works. She works in parallel for Perros Negros, a curatorial collective co-founded by her in 2003 as editor of the yearly magazine Pazmaker. Her work has been recently shown in the following exhibitions: Let's Not Jump Into Concrete, Independenza, Rome (solo, 2014); Marrakech Biennale 5 (2014); Documenta 13, Kassel (2012); NY-USA, Algus Greenspon, New York (solo, 2012); S.S.O.R., Kunsthalle Basel (solo, 2012); and Scryyns and Interesting Theories, Air de Paris, Paris (solo, 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
Anna-Sophie Berger
»let rise, let go«
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
November 6 — 30, 2014
Upon entering Anna-Sophie Berger’s show at the 21er Raum, one encounters a distinctive scent of freshly baked bread. Bread as a basis for nutrition is synonymous with our existential needs. The “daily bread” can be seen as a symbol of the emergence of human culture, of the simple procedure and recipe that includes the baking of material as the basis of human production, which is expressed through its various religious and social connotations.
Anna-Sophie Berger uses whole-grain bread sculptures as manifestations of deceleration and negotiates degrees of cultural fragmentation and uprooting: with hardly more than a week spent at the same place, the contemporary artist’s daily routines can hardly be defined by geographic characteristics. The baking of bread, together with the everyday life of the artist’s mother as a counterpart to that of a digital native fathoms ideas of home and belonging, questions for stable elements that depend on a predefined structure as, for example, a list of ingredients.
In the present case, baking bread can be seen here as sculptural production, even though the outcome is ephemeral. The bread loaves are not processed for conservation, but are, on the contrary, hardening during the course of the exhibition to be finally shredded and fed to animals, by which the cycle is closed.
Bread and its organic lability are representative of a material reality that contrasts the textile panels and their respective motifs. Digital photographs are printed on various polyester fabrics whose textile structure imitates such natural textiles as silk or cotton. The images have been selected from a multitude of snapshots taken compulsively with a mobile phone camera – fragments of Anna-Sophie Berger’s everyday life. She describes the pictures as “visual illustration of an incessant thought process”, and the panels “as an attempt to probe the relation between material and information”.
The panels are up to 65 feet long, each confined to a single image repeating itself and referring ever again to the difference between digital and physical quantity. The pixelated grain of the enlarged photographic material formally makes for a poetic effect, suggesting closeness while romanticizing rather than documenting a situation. Depicted are a chess piece from the Medieval Collection of the Cloisters Museum in New York, gems from the Natural History Museum in Vienna, a molecular cooking dish, eggshells, and a broken salad plate – intact and fragmented objects of a very distinct physical materiality and texture – cultural artifacts and food. Digitally processed before having been printed, they are already artificial representations of natural surface qualities. The juxtaposition mirrors the perception of a specific space that Berger inhabits as an artist tourist, oscillating between cultural reception, artistic agent, and the daily commodity of nutrition regardless of place and context.
Both groups are charged with contemporary doubts about cultural affiliation, internationality, identity, location of self, geopolitics, and ethical goals – emphasized by the text collages on the glass works. Notes taken simultaneously in time and space complete the inner discourse. As fragments of thoughts they indicate a certain conflict, a persistent hovering between options.
What are we to eat if emotions and individual socialization define our consumption just as much as ecological and ethical reflections should, whilst keeping in mind financial reality? How can our needs be sustainably satisfied and what can we feel responsible for? What could be the balance between life and its virtual representation?
Berger’s exhibition in the 21er Raum reflects on the complex relation between social needs, political responsibility and economic reality. A desire for certain things seems to override the capacity to judge one’s own decisions sufficiently. The impossibility to do the one right thing is reflected in an interplay between yielding and resisting, warm and cold – silk and cotton. Her works try to fathom a balance between the immateriality of a digital world and a still-physical human existence, in the end negotiating material itself. What is the form and texture of an image? Objects of both symbolic and emotional value within a loop of material representations is what Anna-Sophie Berger leaves you with: A confusion by relating the self to a changing world where effigy and objects tend to be more and more indistinguishable.
Anna-Sophie Berger’s work negotiates specific characteristics of material and production while reflecting upon the context of objects and their distribution. Her work probes the boundaries of disciplines and their fluent transitions in order to reach a critical understanding of individual motivations and feelings. She is interested in the daily tension between physical reality, sensual needs of a social being, and an increasingly digital perception of life.
Anna-Sophie Berger was born in Vienna, where she lives and works, in 1989. Her work has recently been shown at Mauve (Vienna), JTT (New York), Mathew (Berlin), Suzanne Geiss Company (New York), Tanya Leighton (Berlin), and Clearing (Brussels).
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
Zin Taylor
»Foto
Studio
Zig-Zag«
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
December 4, 2014 — January 11, 2015
From October to December 2014, Zin Taylor was invited for a residency at 21er Haus in Vienna. As an artist in residence there is an opportunity to distance oneself from the everyday life, to work freely and undisturbed in an empty studio while getting to know Vienna and its artists. The Canadian-born artist took advantage of this situation and built on it. Even though the production of art outside of studio situations, known as post-studio-practice since the 1960s, is more of the opposite of Taylor’s practice. And that, although he is attributable to conceptual art, which once coined this term.
Zin Taylor usually works with sculpture, text, drawings, collage, video and audio. His basic formal vocabulary is abstract and minimal: predominantly black and white, his works are often populated by dots and stripes. These dots and stripes are of course abstract, but just as abstract as signs can be.
Linguistics uses the terms signified and signifier, meaning something denoted and the word itself describing something. There is not necessarily a relation between the form of a term and its meaning, except habituality and a societal agreement on a reference. In this sende, Taylor uses his stripes and dots as a visualization of language and its performance, transforming abstract signs into symbols for communication. So his initial question is all about how objects translate ideas and how ideas can become manifest in objects.
Zin Taylor came to Vienna with this vocabulary in his hand baggage. And as you could expect from a conceptual artist, he conceived a project addressing the site – not the exhibition space though, but the situation of an empty residency studio. He started to draw and to produce objects using clay, wire and plaster. He reacted on the outcome of the initial production and created new objects – he let himself be guided by the material, tried to let it speak and generate forms out of it, just like in classical sculpting.
This time his work is all about the language of production – the form that takes on a life of its own via countless thoughts and enters into dialog with the artist. The artist calls the forms emerging this process “units”. “Units”, like Taylor states, “describe the translation of ideas about a subject into a form about a subject. Units are what exist in physical space after the thinking and abstracting settles into shape. They are a way of handling information. The insinuation is that a thing, like a narrative, is made of many units—like how letters are used to produce words, words are used to produce a sentence, and then a statement.“
The elements developed in the studio were finally arranged in various combinations and formations and photographed. The result are no objects that are ideas, but a narration revolving around the formation and entanglement of streams of thought – a photo series about the production of things like they are thought, not as they seem. As permanently negotiable subjects they are the protagonists of Zin Taylor’s tale about the language of form, and in this case a metanarration about the language of form an artist has to struggle with during his residency.
Zin Taylor was born in Calgary, Canada, in 1978 and currently lives and works in Brussels. Taylor has presented solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America. Writing by Zin Taylor, and his artist books, have been published by Sternberg Press (Berlin), Bywater Bros. Editions (Port Colborne), Mousse Publishing (Milan), Karma (New York), and Artforum (New York).
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
Salvatore Viviano
»I never liked being in bed alone«
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
Februar 4 — April 6, 2015
Salvatore Viviano is always good for a surprise. His surprises are mostly performances, pictorial and sculptural objects, photographs and installations – or a mixture of all of it. At 21er Raum, the artist primarily reduced the space. Entering the space, visitors are facing a coral-colored wall with a little opening. Two images are hung on the other walls, a number was written on one, and a plush toy sits in a corner. The teddy wears a pullover with a print on it reading “Call Me Maybe” – a reference to a pop song by Carly Rae Jepsen and its music video, but also an invitation to give someone a ring. Whom to (maybe) call is left unclear, but a telephone number was written on the wall.
The smaller of the two canvases shows an idealized flame, respectively the Tinder logo. That’s an app for smartphones that playfully connects singles. A happy family in bed is on the second canvas. The faces of the advertisement photography are covered by Viviano’s own, who is now in bed with himself.
But then there is this opening in the wall. On its threshold is a kind request to put off one’s shoes. After entering, visitors can crawl under a relative low ceiling to another opening. Slipped through, one finds oneself on a huge bed. On it, there are pillows and blanket, a lot of books and a Walkman, a calendar and posters. Salvatore Viviano has settled in here, but not alone. We are all invited to use the bed – to take a hiatus and just hang out. And all of that not alone, but with others. Because the artist sees a bed not primarily as a private room but as a social space. And he of course wants to share this view with us.
So it’s all about human relations and the establishing of a situation enabling low-threshold interaction – like Tinder and similar apps do. In addition, the installation is a symbol of a modern melancholy and an homage to Viviano’s favorite piece of furniture. He even placed a bed in his One Work Gallery, right after it opened in May 2014: “Beds fascinate me, I love them! I think the bed is the best invention there is. A lot of things happen in bed. As an artist, a lot of ideas come up in bed, you sleep, eat, have sex. And it’s a comfortable place of retreat. Working in a gallery particularly means: waiting, sitting, calling, reading. I didn’t want to sit in front of a table all day. Furthermore, I have some back problems since a while. The bed was a logic answer. Sometimes I fall asleep, and wake up when the doorbell rings and someone comes in.”
Salvatore Viviano was born in Palermo in 1980 and lives and works in Vienna since 2008. Amongst others, he did performances and shows at Ve.Sch (Vienna, 2009), Pro Choice (Vienna, 2010), L’Ocean Licker (Vienna, 2011), 68 m2 (Copenhagen, 2011), Global Talks (Stockholm, 2012), Glockengasse 9 (Vienna, 2012), 21er Haus (2013), Albertina (2013), Limbo (Copenhagen, 2014) and Mauve (Vienna, 2014). Since May 2014, he is running the One Work Gallery at Vienna’s Getreidemarkt. When he was seven years old, he asked his mother to take him to the circus. She answered: “If they want to see you, they have to come!”
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
Rosa Rendl
»What You Desire«
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
April 15 — June 7, 2015
Wanting, desiring, longing for something – that’s the condition that Rosa Rendl addresses in her exhibition. These days we seem to be in a state of perpetual longing. We are constantly faced with seductive worlds of images. Social media sites especially are places that generate non-stop stimuli to which we also contribute as users. In online forums we are continuously reproducing and positioning ourselves as well as awakening longings – for not only do we desire but we also want to be desired.
But virtual space is not physical space, but a mediated one. This means there is a filter between what we desire and ourselves. We look at the world through a window of cold light. This perception of the world has become the norm: We spend a large part of our time on the internet, go to bed with a computer that seems to know us better than our closest friends.
We have an almost intimate relationship with our smartphones, laptops, and tablets. We touch these devices to use them, scroll through content with our fingers as if stroking them. The tactile quality helps to establish a different relationship with this medium, compared to, say, with a TV. It is more immediate, and the boundaries between the physical and virtual world thus seem to blur. And that’s also supported by the circulating images, which we do not encounter with the same frequency in our analogue lives.
These pictures communicate closeness and seem familiar. They are taken with smartphones, often out of focus, and celebrate their casualness. They represent the everyday while the special is embedded within them. The democratization of photography and its rise to become a medium of communication also opened the way for banal images, not made for posterity, but establishing some space for muted subtext.
In her exhibition, Rosa Rendl also shows a series of pictures taken with her smartphone. Their aspect ratio is just the same as an iPhone touchscreen and they also feature the characteristic chromatic noise. They show small gestures like touches, a moment of watching films in bed, the detail of a body, a smartphone on a bed, a glimpse through a person’s thighs, a still life of a silk flower, a selfie, food on the bed, one’s shadow cast on the wall, a cat. They are staged photographs that engage with, or rather imitate, the pictorial language of social networks.
The images revolve around contemporary life torn between privacy and publicity, presence and virtuality. The leaking of our private lives redefines privacy today, while at the same time we can be anonymous and disappear among the masses. But we are still sitting somewhere while surfing the internet. That’s often in the comfort of our own homes. We can stay warm in bed while being far away virtually. But it’s not really satisfying. Because we are constantly being seduced, but cannot be satisfied as fast as the visual worlds suggest. The touching of the screen is not enough, as the desire for a reality beyond its imagery lingers on.
But this dissolving of boundaries is manifested at another level as well. Sometimes printed on both sides, these photographs simultaneously present a world above the glossy surfaces – details like cigarettes lying around, blazing flames or a hand swiping across the screen are all indications. In these works, both levels merge into a single image and staged daily life becomes one with the equally staged reality on top. Here there is an intermingling of what is increasingly merging today: digital and analogue social life. In the light of the screen it is not unusual for us to lose sight of our rhythms of day and night. A distance to our own body evolves as we increasingly regard it as a tool and yet still yearn to be touched. Egocentricity and isolation are held in balance with our longing for closeness. And longing and desire are all that remain, both in Rendl’s mirror image of our reality and in a world in which the interplay of truth and illusion is constantly creating new realities.
Born in 1983, Rosa Rendl lives and works in Vienna. Her work was recently on display in the exhibitions “How Alive Are You”, Bar Du Bois, Vienna (2014), “Let’s Mingle”, Franz Josefs Kai 3, Vienna (2014) and “Rendl-Wittmann & Buschmann”, Parallel Fair Vienna, Vienna (in collaboration with Adrian Buschmann, 2014). In 2010, Daphne Ahlers and Rendl formed the band Lonely Boys. Their latest performances include concerts at Künstlerhaus, Graz (2015) and Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna (2014).
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
Rita Vitorelli
»Volatile Color Rushes through Time«
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
March 13 — April 21, 2014
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
»Embrace the shit«
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
January 15 — February 23, 2014
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
Vittorio Brodmann
»Ups and Downs«
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
November 20, 2013 — January 6, 2014
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
Mathias Pöschl
»you must learn«
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
April 17 — May 12, 2013
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.
Mathias Pöschl, born in 1981, lives and works in Vienna, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts until 2008. His recent exhibitions include: FAcES, Burgenländische Landesgalerie, Eisenstadt (2012), Galleri Ping-Pong, Malmö (2011), Fine Line, Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna (2010), Confligere, Kunstverein Schattendorf (2010), heute geschlossen, morgen geöffnet, swingr, Vienna (2006).
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