picks November 11, 2013

UBERMORGEN

Roland Barthes once famously proclaimed that as individuals we must become active within a system in order to demonstrate our agency and, as circumstances require, offer resistance, which means (in terms of semiotics) to distort the codes rather than to destroy them. UBERMORGEN’s current exhibition, “userunfriendly,” unpacks this idea through the lens of media activism and institutional critique. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx (Maria Haas) achieved prominence as an artistic duo with [V]ote-Auction, 2000, a work that is featured prominently here. During the 2000 US presidential election, voters could

picks July 17, 2013

Nikolaus Gansterer

Art and science generally complement each other, like two sides of a coin: When one moves into the foreground of thought, the other continues to operate in the background, and vice versa. With his current exhibition, Nikolaus Gansterer succeeds in making these two proverbial levels visible at the same time. Here, Gansterer combines experimental procedural methods à la Athanasius Kircher with the rich modernist formalism of Alexander Calder through his own network of diagramatically drawn spaces.

The fragile drawings that Gansterer renders on two-dimensional media, such as paper or vellum, only

picks June 19, 2013

Sofie Thorsen

The light and playful way children experience the world is especially in evidence when they interact with the objects in their immediate environment—experimenting with forms and materials, continually shaping them into new creations and figures of thought. The exhibition of Danish artist Sofie Thorsen, who lives in Vienna, takes as its point of departure the phenomenon of so-called play sculptures, whose pipes, caves, platforms, ladders, peepholes, and hiding places found their way into the destroyed cities of postwar Europe and provided much-needed free spaces—spaces for the imagination—for

picks May 18, 2013

Esther Stocker

Artist Esther Stocker either chases images into the space of the viewer or drives them back into the shallow depth of the wall. At the center of her artistic practice exists the grid—the foundational organizing principle and paradigm of visual art of the twentieth century that was lauded for its generative output while maintaining an imperviousness to change. Stocker offers new variations on the grid in this exhibition, be they in black, white, or shades of gray, as well as structured in new artistic media.

In her untitled series from 2013, Stocker transfers photographs of her previously painted

picks March 28, 2013

Daniel Egg

Since at least the 1960s, the visual dimension of language and the linguistic dimension of the image have evolved into phenomena on equal footing, exerting a broad influence on art production to this day. Daniel Egg takes this as a point of departure for his latest exhibition, “Words – On Air,” and analyzes the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet. His photographic series “Information Stream,” 2010, consists of supposedly scientific photographs of cigarette smoke, changing from yellow-white to gray. To produce the work, the artist stood in a darkened space and exhaled smoke against a light

picks February 09, 2013

“Cinematic Scope”

Mixing black and white yields a spectrum of colors that fall under the shade of gray, of course, and this group exhibition likewise pursues a blend between the black box of the movie theater and the white cube of the gallery, a long-standing couple that is here reconsidered. The exhibition comprises works by six emerging artists who reflect on the potential of manipulating cinematographic content, form, and material through a variety of approaches that draw upon the legacy of the Expanded Cinema movement via a digital, twenty-first-century perspective.

The interplay between projector, screen,

Franz Thalmair