Heimo Zobernig
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The Vienna-based artist Heimo Zobernig has achieved wide recognition for his sculptures, paintings, videos and performances.
For this solo exhibition at Malmö Konsthall, which is Zobernig’s first solo presentation in the Nordic countries, a series of new sculptures reflects on the iconic architecture of the gallery space, unpacking its role as a neutral container for art. The artist has incorporated the temporary partition walls built to display works in the preceding exhibition, Joan Jonas’s Light Time Tales, which have been left unaltered in their original positions. This enables them to gain significance as sculptures that bear an ambivalent resemblance to plinths and stage props, subtly questioning what an
artwork is.
The Vienna-based artist Heimo Zobernig has achieved wide recognition for his sculptures, paintings, videos and performances. With works that respond to the legacy of the discourses and themes of formalist, abstract and Minimalist art, often establishing a close dialogue with the architecture and history of a specific place, he is an important representative of the artists associated with “Kontext Kunst” (Context Art) in the German-speaking art scene of the 1990s. His practice is defined by a calculated balance that playfully calls into question form and function, as well as the presentation and staging of art.
For this solo exhibition at Malmö Konsthall, which is Zobernig’s first solo presentation in the Nordic countries, a series of new sculptures reflects on the iconic architecture of the gallery space, unpacking its role as a neutral container for art. The artist has incorporated the temporary partition walls built to display works in the preceding exhibition, Joan Jonas’s Light Time Tales, which have been left unaltered in their original positions. This enables them to gain significance as sculptures that bear an ambivalent resemblance to plinths and stage props, subtly questioning what an artwork is.
The exhibition title sets up a dialogue with the ideas of the legendary Swedish theatre and film director Ingmar Bergman, who in 1954 wrote the play Wood Painting for his students at the Malmö City Theatre. Inspired by a fourteenth-century mural painting of a little church in southern Småland, Bergman’s production depicted various characters’ attempts to avoid the Black Death, and shortly afterwards became the basis for his celebrated film The Seventh Seal.
Dispersed through the exhibition space are modular stage podiums whose tops are covered by a black and white chequered fabric. They appear soft, warm and fluffy, inviting viewers to sit on them and spend time in the gallery while gently directing their attention to the building – a work of architecture as famous as its exhibition programme. Geometric nets and chequered boards have been a recurring motif in Zobernig’s work. If the grid was adopted as a formalist vocabulary by significant modernist artists, from Piet Mondrian and Max Bill to Sol LeWitt, Zobernig deploys it as a way to spoil the viewer’s thirst for visual pleasure, and to suggest a freer understanding of art as an open visual code.
A publication will be released by Malmö Konsthall during the exhibition’s run. In collaboration with the independent curator and editor Moritz Küng, the artist has produced a hybrid between a catalogue raisonné and an artist’s book titled Books & Posters. Presenting and contextualising over two hundred artist’s books, monographs, exhibition catalogues and posters, the publication will offer an original and comprehensive overview of the ways in which Zobernig has engaged with an expanded notion of publishing as a way to explore the linguistic aspects of art.
Curator: Diana Baldon
Opening Friday January 29, 6–9 p.m. Diana Baldon, Director of Malmö Konsthall, presents the exhibitions at 7 p.m. in the presence of the artists.
Malmö Konsthall och Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König släpper boken Heimo Zobernig – Books & Posters. Catalogue raisonné 1980-2015. Boken finns till försäljning i vår bokhandel från och med lördagen den 16/4.
Heimo Zobernig (b. 1958, Mauthen, Austria) is the recipient of numerous honours and international awards. In 1994 and 1995 he was a guest professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (University of Fine Arts of Hamburg). In 1999 and 2000 he taught sculpture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Since 2000 he has been professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His most recent solo exhibitions include the representation of Austria at the 56th Venice Biennale and a show at Kunsthaus Bregenz (both 2015); as well as those at kestnergesellschaft in Hannover and Mudam Luxembourg (both 2014); Kunsthaus Graz (2013); Palacio de Velázquez/Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (2012); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2011). Over the past twenty years he has taken part in some of the most important international exhibitions, including two earlier Venice Biennales (1988 and 2001), documenta in Kassel (1992 and 1997), and Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997).