The Show unites works of seven contemporary artists which have been successfully performing on the international exhibition stage. Their artistic vocabulary is subject to a constant progress, acute adjustment, medial expansion and vital de-and re-contextualisation. This exhibition, which has been compiled by the Austrian artist Peter Kogler in friendly dialogue with the artists, is the largest group exhibit to date in the spaces of the Mezzanin gallery. Created are corresponding juxtapositions of diverse pieces as well as an associated dynamic sampling of the spatial situation which copiously excludes a one-dimensional readability.
A virtue, which denotes the works of the conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner since the late 60’s, and which he stages and unfolds solitarily through the utilization of language as an artistic medium, in the form of irritated, abstracted and formulistic statements about empirical realities.
To visualize exclusively from the outside, through a recessed peephole, is the complex, installation test arrangement of the German painter Albert Oehlen. His constantly demanding exhaustion of the artistic and social possibilities of painting and the inclusion of all additionally conceivable limitations in and outside of art, turns the observer into a voyeuristic accomplice of a narcissistic, surrealistic (self-) demounting of a painting archetype. This includes ironical reversions of historical reference works such as Duchamp’s last major work "étant donnes".
The past Modernism and its rich offerings of images and iconographic symbols may be seen as endlessly combinable material. To recognize this interaction and to understand the resulting, purely decorative moments as equal artistic means is elevated by the work of Swiss artist John Armleder. His wall painting features a serial adaptation of a golden skull motif.
Sturtevants Oeuvre has in the past been falsely assigned to Appropriation Art, due to her signed reproductions of well-known Modernist works. In the recent past her opus has received substantial re-evaluation as well as an adequate examination, which is very much due to the comprehensive summary of exhibitions. In her newest body of video works it is not only artistic production that serves as a starting point. The dyadic piece shown in the exhibition features a digital reworking of advertising images of the American TV industry in an exposing dialogue with national rituals of agreeable sense-making.
An early pioneer of the serial and an influential advocate of the artistic equality of all media is Thomas Bayrle. In the exhibition he is represented with a work which is a surprisingly timeless comment on the media association, which has validity independent of its individual cultural and political constitution.
The Freud of an owing, surreal methodology, of the mixing of worldly things with those of a personal consciousness and the organisation of the descent within oneself in order to artistically work with the gained realities is an important aspect within Californian artist Matt Mullican’s Hypnotism-Performances. The shown video documentation of such a performance accompanies his hypnotic Alter-Ego through the annihilation of the separation of the world and art. This parting aims at the examination of life as a historical construct that is made from memory, fantasy and social conditioning.
One of the most important contemporary conceptual artists, John Baldessari, has conducted substantial studies of the mechanisms of medial representation and auratic fractions. This is exposed and illuminated in his thwarted confrontation of black and white photography which is set upon applied wallpaper that is printed with subjects of a provocatively banal significance.
Text Christian Egger