Sabine B. Vogel

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  print May 2016

  Edgar Honetschläger

  Those who make the pictures rule the world: By shaping our view of reality and informing our desires, pictures control what we do. Few institutions have exploited this power more expertly than the Catholic Church. For many centuries, images were the primary medium through which it disseminated its messages. In the twentieth century, however, Hollywood ousted the Vatican as the global capital of visual production. Near the beginning of Edgar Honetschläger’s new feature-length film Los Feliz, 2016, three cardinals congregate in Rome to confer about the Church’s fall from supremacy; they decide to

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  picks April 23, 2014

  “Love Me, Love Me Not”

  Organized by the nonprofit YARAT Contemporary Art, this exhibition debuted in the arsenal of last year’s Venice Biennial and is now on view in the futuristic Zaha Hadid–designed Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan. The show’s curator, Dina Nasser-Khadivi, has gathered works by sixteen artists—from Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Georgia—some of whom currently live in New York or London, and the artists’ homelands are a main theme in all the works.

  Aida Mahmudova, founder of YARAT, presents her sculpture Recycled, 2012–13—made with ornamentally crafted mirrors that produce a dizzying

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  picks December 28, 2013

  Adel Abdessemed

  Adel Abdessemed’s Spring, 2013, is an emotionally overwhelming video that documents chickens burning. It caused an outrage when it was originally shown, sending people about Doha into umbrage over its explicit contents—though the burning is actually a special effect. Noteworthy for the defensive reflex it provokes, Spring bolsters the premise of Abdessemed’s latest exhibition, ironically titled “The Golden Age,” which summons a world marked by violence.

  At the museum’s entrance, a vase crowns a pedestal made of bombs; behind it is an expansive sculpture of two cars smashed into each other, made

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  picks November 04, 2013

  Inci Furni

  The image-world of the young Turkish artist Inci Furni is strange. In her previous watercolors she presented a single scene on paper or an isolated motif, including flying superwomen, space architecture, birds, and mummified beings with leaves as protective shields. In her exhibitions, Furni has arranged these pages into personal and ultimately cryptic narratives, like visual diaries, often offering the suggestion of a planet that appears to support life. While a definitive deciphering of these images is not possible, their common points of reference seem to be social transformation and gender

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  print October 2013

  Nilbar Güreş

  Blood trickles from a potted plant into a puddle of water lapping at a blow-dryer. A magician’s hat floats above the dryer’s electrical cord, from which razor blades, revolvers, and a bottle of poison rise into the air. Farther to the right, we see a stage curtain, a folding screen, a dark and ghostly creature in an armchair, cockroaches, a sea horse. All these details have been painted in textile inks with a fine brush on various fabrics that have then been sewn onto a large piece of dark-blue cloth; some are fragments of fabric stitched onto the backdrop. This piece, Artist’s Home Studio (all

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  print January 2013

  Sudarshan Shetty

  A man juggles three ceramic jars in slow motion—the action is insignificant, a piece of entertainment. With this video—all works Untitled (from the show “the pieces earth took away”), 2012—Sudarshan Shetty invited us into his exhibition, which was indeed titled “the pieces earth took away.” Only with time did this reveal itself to be the concentrated image of a big theme: death. While the five works in this exhibition were not conceived specifically for Vienna, they together formed an effective rejoinder to the city’s famous “Wienerlieder,” its folk songs in local dialect, which

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  picks December 16, 2011

  Edgar Honetschläger

  Perhaps best known as a filmmaker, Edgar Honetschläger makes work that often features sparse and symbolically charged actions. The Austrian artist’s latest film, AUN – The Beginning and the End of All Things, 2011, forgoes a linear narrative and instead seduces the viewer into a search for a livable future via a wondrous and poetic sci-fi world. His current exhibition, “framboise frivol,” features new drawings and large-scale paintings. These are humorous, philosophical works in which small and repetitive figures are arranged on wide, white, and empty spaces.

  Here, the artist, who lived for many

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  picks August 18, 2011

  Anne Schneider

  Long, thin iron rods emerging from amorphous cement forms rise throughout Anne Schneider’s latest exhibition. Around them are stacked blankets, a stool, and a ladder. Each of these sculptures plays on associations, because the materials, as well as the forms, are familiar from everyday life. But their appearance is strange: In some works the concrete forms cling to the rods, while in others the rods appear to hover off their concrete bases. How can something so heavy float? How can something so hard as concrete appear, again and again, so soft? And how is it that these unpoetic materials become

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  previews May 2011

  William J. O'Brien

  Chicago-based artist William J. O’Brien’s sculptures, drawings, and paintings are shrewdly insouciant.

  Chicago-based artist William J. O’Brien’s sculptures, drawings, and paintings are shrewdly insouciant. Whether rendering enchantingly naive patterns in colored pencil or sculpting ceramic heads that combine the tacky craftsmanship of a ’70s vase with the exaggerated features of a mask, O’Brien often flirts with kitsch. But the artist’s engagement with the ornamental, and his intuitive combination of found and handmade forms, are in fact fascinating reflections on the contemporary art object’s complex identity. This exhibition will focus on O’Brien’s ceramic sculptures,

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  picks March 15, 2011

  Gavin Turk

  Many of the works in this carefully assembled exhibition examine transience: A cone of ash is all that remains at a human’s end; a brick is reminiscent of long-gone street demonstrations; one of the maps of the world is plastered with brightly colored marketing logos, while on another they are peeling away like old paint. “Before the World Was Round” is the title Gavin Turk has given to this latter white map piece, and it also serves as the title for his solo show at Galerie Krinzinger. With this phrase, he refers not to the Dark Ages but rather to one––or many––changes of perspective. Each work

• print December 2010

  Thomas Wrede

  All that can be seen for miles is an undefined milky white surface. Amid a welter of footprints, two tiny figures meander toward the horizon. Im Nebel (In the Fog), 2004, is part of Thomas Wrede’s series “Am Meer” (Seascapes), 2001–2007—images that show people seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes we see these figures strolling by the waterside or just standing in the shallow waters of the river Watt. Sometimes the people are barely visible between the tufts of grass poking out of the dunes, as in Dünengras mit Sitzenden (Marrram Grass with People Sitting in the Sand), 2005; sometimes

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  picks October 28, 2010

  Christian Philipp Müller

  For nearly five centuries, the coarse woolen fabric called loden has been produced in Styria, a state in southwest Austria. The material is primarily used in Trachtenkleidung, a type of traditional Austrian clothing that is often produced in olive green and gray-brown. Originally intended to protect against inclement weather, today Trachtenkleidung clothing has become a symbol of conservative values such as a nativist devotion to one’s homeland. What happens, then, when the shape and color of the loden garment are altered? For his 2010 project BURNING LOVE (Lodenfüßler), the Swiss artist Christian