Caroline Lillian Schopp

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  print March 2022

  EXIT STRATEGY

  NEITHER GÜNTER BRUS NOR ALFONS SCHILLING were very good custodians of their early work, much of which is lost. For the financially secure Schilling, this was the consequence of a nomadic and adventurous lifestyle. From 1960 to 1964, the Swiss artist lived in Vienna and Paris, before moving to New York, though he continued to travel extensively, including stays in Mexico, Greece, Mallorca, and Mali. In contrast, the same time span saw Brus enmeshed in personal hardships, from his mandatory military service in Austria in 1961 to his discovery, in 1964, that after a winter spent washing dishes and

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  print April 2020

  “4 × 1 = 30”

  Since opening in 1989, Christine König Galerie in Vienna has been a beacon for both established and emerging international contemporary art. The gallery’s driving concerns can be located at the intersection of art with feminism and activism, politics and literature, concept and environment—all of which could be found in the group show marking its thirtieth anniversary. For this exhibition, playfully titled “4 × 1 = 30” and curated by a new generation of gallery associates—Robby Greif, Teresa Kamencek, Elsa König, and Andrea Kopranovic—four young artists were each invited to contribute a

• previews May 2019

  “WE ARE MANY: EXPERIMENTS IN COLLECTIVITY”

  Curated by Fernanda Pitta, Amanda Arantes, and Jochen Volz

  In an interview in Artforum in 1969, Joseph Beuys stated, “To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.” Arguably, Beuys’s most lasting lesson was that artists’ practices should explore the ways in which collectivities are constituted; this position informed his experiments in “social sculpture.” So what would it mean to belong to the “Beuys school” today? Is it productive to continue such a tradition? This upcoming show in São Paulo will depart from these questions, bringing works by Beuys across different media together with pieces by

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  previews September 2018

  “JÖRG IMMENDORFF: FÜR ALLE LIEBEN IN DER WELT”

  “For All the Beloved in the World,” the catchy tagline of the upcoming Jörg Immendorff retrospective at Haus der Kunst, is taken from the titles of several paintings from the artist’s late-1960s corpus that feature two recurring figures: big blossoms in red, orange, and yellow hues, and big babies painted “red,” “yellow,” and “brown.” Kitsch and uncanny, cute and offensive, these works exemplify the disconcerting ambivalence that traverses Immendorff’s important oeuvre. From his early activities across a range of media while in the orbit of Joseph Beuys to his later

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  print February 2018

  ACTIVE DUTY: THE ART OF FRANZ ERHARD WALTHER

  IN THE SUMMER of 1972, at Documenta 5, Franz Erhard Walther demonstrated the use of the fifty-eight discrete objects of his 1. Werksatz (First Work Set), 1963–69. Now iconic, the 1. Werksatz exemplifies the type of art for which Walther is best known: wall-hung or floor-bound cloth works that are meant to be activated in particular ways by visitors, or “users.” Documenta 5 presents a historic moment in the changing attitudes of institutions and the public toward participatory or action-based art. Curated by Harald Szeemann under the rubric “Questioning Reality,” the exhibition marked the

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  print November 2014

  “Beuys Brock Vostell”

  This ambitious, extensively researched exhibition, “Beuys Brock Vostell,” curated by Peter Weibel with Eckhart Gillen, takes as its starting point several collective actions in which Joseph Beuys, Bazon Brock, and Wolf Vostell participated. These include the international Fluxus Festival der Neuen Kunst (Festival of New Art) in Aachen, Germany, in July 1964, a pioneering live television broadcast from Düsseldorf in December of the same year, and finally the Happening 24 Stunden (24 Hours) at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, in June 1965, which also included Charlotte Moorman, Nam June

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  print Summer 2014

  Sofie Thorsen

  “Just as axonometric projection eliminates every fixed, unique viewpoint,” writes Yve-Alain Bois in his essay “Metamorphoses of Axonometry” (1981/1983), “so it has been used throughout history in a multiple, contradictory fashion.” Sofie Thorsen’s recent work evokes parallel complexity, exploring axonometry through wall drawings and panels in a series of “Screens Within Screens,” 2014. While this title refers to one specific component of her work on view—meshes of black-line wall drawings executed on three of Krobath’s five walls—it also describes the multiplication and interplay of

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  print April 2014

  Thomas Hartmann

  For more than three decades, Thomas Hartmann has explored the materiality of oil paint and repeatedly shown how it can attenuate tensions between interior and exterior, massive and minute, visible and legible. Like many postwar German painters—from Anselm Kiefer to David Schnell—Hartmann pursues this investigation at the border of figuration and abstraction. Crystallizing his unique achievement, the seven large oils exhibited recently in Vienna concern the ubiquity and increasing homogeneity of storage in contemporary life. The canvases suggest shelves, hard drives, folders, books,