print February 1993

Gerwald Rockenschaub

The ordinary scaffold with which Gerwald Rockenschaub divided the great room of the Galerie carrée is neither a found object nor a sculpture—although it was built to his specifications. Despite its overwhelming material presence, it is not the object that can claim to be a work of art, but, rather, the art work is the physical experience out of which the esthetic and intellectual dimension of the work grows. The construction of the scaffold allowed the viewerto ascend to a platform and traverse the space, ultimately descending on the other side of the room, behind it.

It is this path that one

print January 1993

Jessica Stockholder

The initial dilemma one must confront when viewing Jessica Stockholder’s work is whether to call it sculpture or painting. This problem seems fairly old-fashioned, especially after the postwar avant-garde tried its very best to dissolve such genre limitations. Perhaps it is just this challenge that gave Stockholder’s installation—this concept seems the most appropriate for the moment—its unsettling character. It recalls those art works that were instrumental in redefining painting and sculpture, image and object. In the end, one must consider whether this work is rehashing an old art-historical

print October 1992

Magdalena Jetelová

In their massive construction and their spatiality, Magdalena Jetelová large wood sculptures have an architectonic character. Along with the gigantic proportions, the relationship between the formal idea and the space has always contributed to this quality as well. These two installations went one step farther by broadening the idea of sculpture and countering the idea that a sculpture is independent of its surrounding space.

Domestizierung einer Pyramide (Domestication of a pyramid, 1992), Jetelová’s largest project to date, was installed in the two-story atrium of the Osterreichisches Museum

print September 1992

Günter Tuzina

For his first exhibit in Vienna, Günter Tuz-ina showed works in all the media in which he has been working since the mid ’70s. Paintings on canvas, works on paper, and wall paintings, separated spatially from each other, make up a dialogic structure from which Tuzina works. The linear base figure, a windowlike square, divided and crossed by a diagonal line, and the saturated colors that fill it balance one another on the whole, but one may predominate depending on the materials of the individual work. For example, the painterly aspects of color come to the fore in the works on paper, and the

print May 1992

Otto Zitko

Prominent in the early '80s among a small group of Austrian artists who combined the sensuality of impasto with highly subjective, magical content, Otto Zitko took a radical turn around 1987, moving toward a more purely graphic concept of artmaking. The direct effects of impasto painting were replaced by an evocation of tension through the graphic traces produced by gestural motor acts. Figurative and symbolic forms were abstracted to barely legible sign-fragments. The vocabulary of gestural elements Zitko has developed and enriched since then are associated with his exploration of new surfaces

print April 1992

Fred Sandback

Consisting of a few pieces, or even only a single stretched wool thread, Fred Sandback’s works fundamentally redefine the perceptual coordinates of sculpture, and yet do so in a thoroughly quiet way. Traditional sculpture requires a total loss of the perceiving body, by its referential structure and embodiment of different levels of reality, or it demands the existential confrontation with a nonreferential object (as in Richard Serra’s work), involving the viewer in a linear polarity of body versus object, with the object always dominant. Sandback’s decorporealized sculptures, however, shift

Christian Kravagna