print October 1996

Erwin Wurm

During the mid ’80s Erwin Wurm gained a reputation for his life-size figurative sculptures in painted sheet metal, but he soon abandoned these works for subtler concepts. Wurm’s recent work can essentially be divided into three groups: his clothing pieces, his “dust pieces,” and his video works. The first group involves transforming articles of clothing—such as sweaters, coats, or pants—into sculptures, by merely folding them. He is uninterested in investing found objects with “aura,” but instead he focuses on his work’s reproducibility. In this show he wrote step-by-step instructions for folding

print May 1995

Hubert Scheibl

Hubert Scheibl has avoided narrative elements in his paintings from the beginning, concentrating instead on the process of painting which can be thought of as a constant oscillation between chaos and order, order and variation. Scheibl’s paintings consist of numerous layers that never really touch one another. They form a layered space that is experienced through a temporal and spatial process. Yet Scheibl does not seal the surfaces hermetically and allows one to glimpse another layer below. He speaks of “systems whose anomalies and detours become ever more frequent and finally lead to a change.”

print September 1994

Anne and Patrick Poirier

Anne and Patrick Poirier’s work first became known in the early ’70s as “preservation of evidence.” This retrospective, some twenty years later, was well-situated for two reasons: Vienna is a “historical” city, reflecting the glitter and decline of a previous era; secondly, the Palais Liechtenstein, where the museum is housed, is a very difficult space in which to present contemporary art. Ostia Antica, 1971–72, was presented at the opening exhibition of the museum, and in this show it received special placement. It stood alone in a large banquet hall whose ceiling is decorated with a fresco by

print February 1994

Brigitte Kowanz

Seldom is an artist successful in using the historical ideas of a particular architecture in a contemporary manner. Brigitte Kowanz has been using light as her medium since the mid ’80s. For her, light is the ideal material for investigating the transitions among various media and hence to work “intermedially” creating new images, spaces, and processes. She didn’t use the large space of the Secession to display a light installation; rather she worked with the space, changing it, and making it part of the work.

If one considers the geometrical system that is the basis of the Secession’s architecture,

print March 1993

Martin Eiter

The starting point of Martin Eiter’s paintings is the revolutionary spirit of the ’80s during which “wild painting” also celebrated its triumphs in Austria. Eiter even shared the studio of two of the most celebrated exponents of this artistic direction, Herbert Brandl and Gunter Damisch. But Eiter chose another direction—away from the expressive palette and materiality of his colleagues. He limits his palette to black and white, to “noncolor,” and only seldom does a slight tone of color shine through the glaze. His renunciation of the emotional qualities of color gives his works a cool distance

print September 1992

Hubert Scheibl

“The soft-footed images that always sneak around us amidst the din, their ears open wide, however fast we may run—one eye that sees, the other that feels . . . .” Hubert Scheibl places these words beneath two photographs in the 1989 book Blind Compass, edited by Markus Brüderlin. They indicate one approach to Scheibl’s world. One photograph shows the artist as he walks up the step to the elevator in the Gründerzeit foyer of the building that contains his studio; the other is taken from the same perspective, only the artist is missing, like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. The viewer is faced

Peter Nesweda