Exhibition of the Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig in Split, as well as an international programme that the Kula Gallery has been promoting in the last few years, is a welcome reminder of potential consequences that the local and national tendency towards self-sufficiency could lead to, tendency that has, paradoxically, become stronger since Croatia joined the EU. From everything we know about the international contemporary painting practice, which is little, very little or nothing at all, Zobernig is a representative of its successful mainstream that has almost nothing in common with the dominant Croatian national orientation towards figurative easel painting and the traditionally understood medium of painting in general. An argument in support of this thesis is my view of the 2nd Biennial of Painting organized in the Meštrović Pavilion in Zagreb by the Croatian Association of Artists (HDLU) in 2013. In parallel with the recent Croatian painting production displayed on the upper pavilion floor, curator Theresia Hauenfels presented her selection of twelve Austrian painters of the younger and middle generation on the ground floor.[1] In comparison with playful individuality of approaches to the medium and discipline, and a particular tendency to abandon two-dimensional matrices shown by the Austrians, going one floor up left an impression of being transported to a different, anachronistic universe which aspired to keep painting two-dimensional on canvases displayed on the walls in an orderly fashion, and to keep artists inside their recognizably personal aesthetic canons. Not having any doubt that there are painters in Croatia, just like in Austria, who are prone to experiment, as well as artists who tend to stay within a generally accepted framework, the difference obviously being in what was considered representative in a given creative moment in referential milieus.
In light of this consideration, it is a shame that the presumed financial-logistical reasons will allow us to see only a selection of Zobernig’s easel paintings in Split, even though the paintings themselves provide sufficient evidence of what a distinctive artist he is. I therefore think it important to mention that Zobernig is a multimedia artist whose creative sphere, besides the narrowly understood discipline of painting, also comprises works in which painting is imbued within site-specific installation and/or ambient of intensive scenic presence that also on occasion includes sculpture. With his oeuvre, Zobernig ideally fits into the paradigm of a contemporary artist that presupposes a multidisciplinary practice in which the artist simultaneously develops each artistic discipline he is working on separately, in order to develop them as required and through different degrees of their interaction when creating complex spatial compositions. The only one of Zobernig’s spatial interventions that I had the opportunity to see live was his sophisticated and carefully thought out intervention in the Austrian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2015.[2] Zobernig intervened in the equilibrium of classic and modern design of the original project by Josef Hoffmann and Robert Kramreiter from 1934, by suspending a black monolith from the ceiling and levelling the floor with a similar black monolith construction to emphasize interior volumes and their interrelationship. By covering the rear façade in black, he also emphasized the relationship between the pavilion and external space, especially the verdant interior courtyard as an integral part of the architecture. The pavilion and the artist’s intervention merged into a total work of art where sporadic spatial elements, like benches and plants in the garden, played a precisely defined role in achieving the desired purity and refinement of a minimalist variation on the theme of Merzbau by Kurt Schwitters.[3] I cannot escape the feeling Zobernig conceives his spatial installations in a painterly manner, so the time a visitor spends in the pavilion could be compared with the experience of immersion into a geometric composition of the “spatialized” image based on the heritage of constructivism. To those familiar with VR technology, it might appear that a construction typical to virtual reality has usurped real space. In Zobernig’s suggestive creation, the pavilion’s achromatic majestic emptiness reverberated with a wide spectrum of meanings. Let’s put aside the formal dialogue of architectural styles and the collision of public expectations with what the artist decided to present. Personally, I was interested in why Zobernig decided to be present to such a degree as to literally alter the pavilion’s architecture, and yet practically remain invisible? How did such a concept refer to the institution of the national pavilion itself in the most prestigious international visual arts manifestation based on the nineteen-century concept of national culture? To what degree are artists who rotate in the biennial rhythm even individually important within the given framework? To what extent is an artist only a representative agent of a moment of national cultural being? How valid, therefore, the concept of national culture still is? Of course, it is possible that these were only my projections, but I could thank the artist’s radical concept for them.
The selection of paintings that Heimo Zobernig intends to present at his first exhibition in Split, solidifies his strategy of directing viewer’s attention towards the formal aspects of his work, its technical excellence and thematic diversity, in order to evoke basic questions about the nature of contemporary painting and creativity in general beyond the sensual saturation he procures. Even at first glance, the paintings reveal an absolute conceptual diversity despite their two unifying parameters – the consistently implemented square format and the artist’s commitment to a reinterpretation of abstract painterly idiom in its entirety. In fact, there does not appear to be a single variation of abstraction that is not included in the exhibition. Beginning with powerful gesture and colour, through the monochrome, Organic abstraction and Op-art, all the way to the application of textual messages and so forth, it seems as if Zobernig tried to reconstruct or synthetize the dynamic history of the century of Abstract art. In that respect, it is hard to escape the impression that by appropriating and reinterpreting formulas and idioms that were developed by the famous painters of High Modernism, he is not avoiding to develop his own consistent and recognizable individual style as something we expect from the great artist, but instead he posited formal and disciplinary unpredictability, an ability to change and adapt like a chameleon, as his own personal style. The artist’s consistent work on square formats initially convinced me that the choice of chameleon strategy was not accidental, because if there is no plan, then why insist on the format that despite the powerful symbolic legacy of the square was not the first choice of surface format in the history of painting, not even in the much shorter history of the technological representation of reality. Namely, the rectangular format of visual message communication is closely related to the fact that what we want to depict is generally wider than it is higher, or higher than wider, except when we are dealing with Concrete art that produces its own reality and its own rules. With a radical departure from the codified attitude that to be a successful artist one has to develop an immediately recognizable style (in marketing terms, a brand), Zobernig is a true representative of the conceptual artistic current that has been asking substantive questions about the purpose and goal of artistic creativity from the 1960s onwards. Unlike his dead serious, and often visually and conceptually boring and gloomy predecessors, in his paintings Zobernig presents himself as an imaginative and playful creator, a sensual hedonist whose witty and scintillating dialogue with modernist heritage and his self-satisfactory programmatic formulas never falter and never loose intellectual curiosity, depth and mental openness that every respectable artistic creativity is based on.
(tekst Branko Franceschi )
[1] Vienna Calling: Alfredo Barsuglia, Johanna Binder, Christian Eisenberger, Dorothee Golz, Aurelia Gratzer, Marlene Hausegger, Karen Holländer, Jakob Lena Knebl, Eric Kressnig, Hans Scheirl, Martin Schnur, Norbert Trummer, Bačva Gallery, 30 October – 24 November 2013
[2] Curator Yilmaz Dziewior
[3] Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1923 – 1937, complete transformation of the living space into a dynamic construct with sculptural values
Heimo Zobernig was born in 1958, in Mauthen, Austria and currently lives in Vienna. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, and later at the University of Applied Arts, both in Vienna. After two visiting professorships in Germany, he has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna since 1999. He was the recipient of the Otto Mauer Prize in 1993, followed in 1997 by the City of Vienna’s Prize for Fine Art.
Zobernig has mined various art historical moments and movements, specifically Modernism, post-Modernism, Geometric Abstraction and Minimalism, with a rigorous and interrogatory spirit. His often playful approach also includes a keen and abiding affinity with modes of display, set design and theatricality.
The artist has had numerous international exhibitions, among them Heimo Zobernig, Sammlung Grässlin, Kunstraum, St. Georgen (2016); Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (2016) Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2016); La Biennale di Venezia (2015); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2014); Documenta 9 and X in Kassel, solo shows at the Kunsthaus Graz (2013); Palacio de Veláquez, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2012); Kunsthalle Zurich (2011); Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane, Australia (2011); Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg (2011); the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2009); Musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux (2009); MAK, Vienna (2008); the Kunsthalle Basel (2003); the K21, Düsseldorf (2003); Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (2002); and his work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart (2012); the Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009); Tate St Ives, Cornwall (2008); and Galleria Civica di Modena (2008).
In 2016 Heimo Zobernig was the winner of the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, and in 2010 he was the winner of the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Art and Architecture in Vienna.
