Exhibition review – Heimo-Zobernig’s big show at Mumok

For Heimo Zubrnig’s first retrospective in 2002/03 at Mumok, shortly after the latter moved into the Museum District, the White Cube was installed in the stairwell, which spanned Level 2 by one corridor. Since then, the metallic structure of the gondola has embellished this spatial sculptural intervention, and now the artist has placed a large black cube on top of the cube, which, when descended at an angle, suggests heaviness. In fact, it is a lightweight cardboard box that reminds us once again of the black square icon of Casimir Mallewicz and his origins in the theater.

Even if the untitled exhibition focuses primarily on the discourse of painting, sculpture at the Vienna Academy devotes the education of artists, as is usually the case to the history of work, which has brought it to several notable exhibition sites, where the catalog chronology displays, extensive art-studies Scientific.

on the border
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From highly rigorous measurements to critical questions to the museum as an institution, it is made on many levels of thought and of many materials. From the architecture to the presentation of the Impulstanz Festival dancers who will be here soon, from the sculpture to the graphic quotes, the furniture and the distribution of painted mannequins, but also a music video has been composed for the informative concert.

The grid design is based on Gerrit Rietveld’s “Sonsbeek Pavilion”, designed by the Dutchman for a sculpture exhibition in Arnhem in 1955. Friction in the style of Classical Modernism also broadened the concept of painting in the 1980s, as Zubrinj, according to Helga Philipp’s concepts, began to bring abstract geometry From the so-called mystical esoteric realms of the early days to an analytical level.

New geometry or new geometry cited monochrome, checkerboard or stripes patterns from simplicity and conceptual art, but also colors from video technology have enriched it all. In 2011, Zubrnig suddenly added Pablo Picasso and, after much colour, also quoting gestural painting, sometimes paradoxically, sometimes as a counter-concept for major geometrically strict motifs such as the grid. The gesture is now also extended to Sections, which act as a hybrid of painting in order to blur the boundaries between art – a feat of the 1980s, which loosely mixed the commodity character of sculpture with postmodern appropriation quotes.

The early color palette and reduced use of materials has now been greatly expanded, the shelf is black as if dripping and still scattered, even the painted mannequins now transcend the palette previously reduced to 15 pure pigment colours, changing as the partially inscribed stained white crystals of a kind of diamond dust . Joseph Boys or Kitsch, the subversive transgressor, lurks next to a screen made of silver nettle, set in a zigzag like a masonry fence. Mannequins drape like in a movie set, the plush blanket in a black and white checkerboard pattern attached to Ingmar Bergman’s play “Painting Wood,” which is set on lounge chairs and furniture for visitors.

The crusader from “The Seventh Seal” Ingmar Bergmans or Stanley Kubrick’s “2001 A Space Odyssey”, as well as the use of diamond dust for pigments predicted by Pete Mondrian: You can learn about all these quotes. It is almost clear that the lines of sight are also “disturbed”, far from the strict, directed view of modernity. The technical situation is still changing.