Sabine B. Vogel

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  picks March 28, 2009

  Isa Melsheimer

  Architecture, sculpture, and painting were to be united in the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk as conceptualized by Walter Gropius in 1919. Until 1920, members of the “Glass Chain” association, including Gropius, brothers Bruno and Max Taut, and Hans Scharoun, exchanged chain letters in which they sketched their ideas for utopian architecture. For her exhibition “Land aus Glas” (Land of Glass), Isa Melsheimer reprises their sketches of fantastic designs in her fabric and glass works. The glass sculptures are exhibited on an oversize platform that cuts through the gallery; strips of fabric, bearing

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  picks March 14, 2009

  Katrin Plavčak

  A black curtain, nonperpendicular walls, and the colored, cone-shaped surfaces attached to them interrupt the otherwise white-cube-like space of this gallery. Disrupting the rectilinear system of exhibition spaces is not only a savvy formal decision but also the result of an all-encompassing methodology. Katrin Plavčak seeks to “dissolve the borders of the medium,” and she does so on all conceivable levels. In the main space, the surfaces used for hanging art have been multiplied to accommodate her many images, in which she combines space-travel and science-fiction territories with heads and

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  picks October 24, 2008

  Fernanda Gomes

  A plastic bag flutters in the front window of this gallery, and blank sheets of white paper block the view into the space. Inside, the entry to the rear section is partially covered with similar sheets of paper; otherwise, the space appears empty. What initially looks like a work being installed turns out to be Fernanda Gomes’s fascinating and subtle arrangement of surfaces and lines: White canvases, pieces of both tissue and heavier paper, taut threads, and transparent Plexiglas conjure up a unique sort of painting. The longer viewers linger, the more the works differentiate themselves:

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  picks October 06, 2008

  Sudarshan Shetty

  A bloodlike liquid drips out of holes in a television screen, the skeleton of a dog bends over the side of a wooden mattress frame, countless pairs of sunglasses slowly move from left to right and back again, and a white substance flows down the sides of a display case filled with bread: Sudarshan Shetty’s mechanical sculptures are enormously powerful images. The artist, who lives in Bombay, titled this impressive and intense exhibition “Leaving Home.” What is home? The materials are drawn from the everyday. Objects that initially seem harmless evoke, at second glance, a world of highly

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  picks June 11, 2008

  “Che Guevara”

  It is one of the most reproduced photographs in the world: Alberto Korda’s 1960 portrait of Che Guevara, taken at a speech given by Fidel Castro. The image became an icon of the student movement; the photogenic doctor and revolutionary became synonymous with liberation and resistance. Dr. Alfred Weidinger, the vice director of the Belvedere, began his collection—which currently contains over three hundred shots of the revolutionary hero—with this photograph. In this selection of 150 portraits, there are images of Guevara doing construction work, speaking at a podium, and striking a heroic pose,

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  picks May 05, 2008

  Andy Coolquitt, Frank Haines, William J. O'Brien

  Artist Andy Coolquitt patches together an entire universe out of found material that's accumulated at his house in Texas. Whether hanging on the wall or suspended low in the middle of the space, the lamps included in this group show are but a small quotation from his entropic artistic project. Constructed from found pieces of metal, these functional sculptures illuminate themselves more than the space in which they reside. In a second room, viewers encounter sculptures by Frank Haines and works on paper by William J. O’Brien. Whereas Coolquitt flirts with a plumber’s formalism, Haines is on the

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  picks April 29, 2008

  Dominik Steiger

  “Kosmöschen Steiger” (Mini-Cosmos Steiger), the title of Dominik Steiger’s small retrospective at Galerie Hohenlohe, perfectly captures the essence of the artist’s extraordinary drawings, collages, objects, and texts, which reveal a powerful universe, in miniature, to the viewer. Steiger first published poems in 1961 and, in the ’70s, began to base his work on the interaction between text and drawing. Steiger, who has been associated with the Wiener Gruppe and Vienna Actionism and has worked with Günther Brus and Dieter Roth, manipulates found objects and words until he reveals unexpected humor

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  picks January 24, 2008

  Tushar Joag

  A sign on the gallery’s entrance wall includes text that reads NO COUNTRY/STATE SHOULD BUILD ANY MONUMENT ON THEIR OWN. Tushar Joag makes this appeal on behalf of the fictitious organization he founded, the UNICELL International Department of Monuments and Edifices. One of Mumbai’s most politically engaged artists, Joag has constructed an arena with bleachers that surround several unusually colorful “monuments” intended for use from afar by all nations: Regime Change (all works 2007), Dry Run, and Curtain Wall and Cell. On the walls around the sculptures are large comics that portray an alter

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  print January 2008

  “Into Position”

  The big institutions of the Viennese art world are in turmoil, leading some observers to see a paradigm shift in the offing; in the meantime, independently organized projects are where much of the real energy is emerging. At Bauernmarkt, in the city center, for instance, the freelance curator Elsy Lahner, the philosopher Michael Göd, and gallery owner Emanuel Layr (of Galerie Layr & Wüstenhagen) made interim use of empty office spaces and apartments as well as artists’ studios for their curatorial venture “Into Position,” which encompassed discussion groups, a “Mittwochsbar” (Wednesday Bar), an

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  picks October 03, 2007

  Herbert Brandl

  Working in bright, vivid colors and often on large canvases, Herbert Brandl draws inspiration from the photographs of landscapes, mountains, meadows, and forests that he takes during his travels and pulls from magazines. His sublime works in the Austrian pavilion of this year’s Venice Biennale turn the space into a quiet temple of painting, although not all the canvases he made for the exhibition could be accommodated there. Hence, two particularly excellent works, as well as other smaller-scale canvases, are now on view in this exhibition. Too dominant to be exhibited in Venice, they are

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  picks September 26, 2007

  Harald Klingelhöller

  Repetition, 1993, the sculpture installed at the museum’s entrance, sends the visitor along a path that soon proves less than smooth, reminding viewers that Düsseldorf-based artist Harald Klingelhöller’s works are more than simply cardboard-and-stone agglomerations of the letters in the works’ titles: They examine the complex relationships between language and sculpture, between concept and space, between imagination and reality. This survey exhibition details Klingelhöller’s evolution. Although the sculptures are based on letters, it is actually what they signify that interests the artist;

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  picks September 25, 2007

  Haluk Akakçe

  Haluk Akakçe, who is known for digitally generated videos that draw from painting, sculpture, and architecture and often feature emotion-inducing sound tracks, is one of the best-known contemporary Turkish artists. His time-based works are caught in a cycle of endless transformation, their abstract details changing with an almost somnambulistic rhythm that moves between the seductive and the threatening. In this exhibition, the artist engages an unusual subject: the meaning of the word definition, which, he posits, has shifted from the rigidly codified to the fluid. Akakçe translates language