Sabine B. Vogel

• 

  picks August 27, 2007

  Brigitte Kowanz

  Vienna-born artist Brigitte Kowans has titled her exhibition “Vo_Lumen,” announcing from the outset that she is concerned with how light fills space and, indeed, is a space itself. Simultaneously magical and minimalist, her neon works draw viewers into intangible spaces by means of light refractions, light diffractions, and light reflected in mirrors. Each technique manages to suggest the swiftness and depth of a river, and through the use of words like ESCAPE and LIGHTING, Kowans creates what might be understood as the ultimate what-you-see-is-what-you-read tautology, one-upping Joseph Kosuth

• 

  picks July 31, 2007

  Kitty Kraus

  In the first room, narrow rectangular slabs of glass protrude from the wall, and ice water, dyed black, seeps across the floor. In the next, surreal geometric sketches flicker across the walls, their source two small, solid boxes that sit humbly on the ground, emanating light from their edges and corners. Breaks and cuts, fragments and fleeting conditions, are central features of Kitty Kraus’s artistic practice. But if that list sounds dry, in the darkened gallery the reifications of these formal concerns nonetheless produce a dramatic mise-en-scène; it’s as though chance materials are being

• 

  picks July 12, 2007

  Adrien Tirtiaux

  The project space at Galerie Martin Janda is not an ideal exhibition venue: The large base of an elevator protrudes into the room, and the window looks out onto an enormous ventilator shaft in the dark rear courtyard. The young Belgian artist Adrien Tirtiaux, who is still studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, has magically transformed this environment with only a few props. Thanks to brown and green paint, the elevator base looks like a tree, while a bizarre mirrored construction conceals the technological infrastructure in the courtyard and fills it instead with sky and sunlight. A

• 

  picks February 16, 2007

  Rudi Stanzel

  Graphite and bitumen were difficult to find during Rudi Stanzel’s two-month residency at the Ningbo Museum of Art, two hundred miles south of Shanghai. For this reason, the artist developed a new and unusual combination of materials for his Minimalist, abstract black, white, and gray pictures included in this exhibition: He applied to canvas strips of very thin handmade rice paper that were painted white with acrylic and then dipped in Indian ink. The vertical and horizontal lines generated by this process seem both heavy as lead and immaterial as fog, creating an extraordinary atmosphere of

• 

  picks February 06, 2007

  Fritz Panzer

  In the 1970s, Fritz Panzer won acclaim for his cardboard sculptures; later, he turned to other media, for instance covering drawn objects with paint. Today, there is renewed interest in the Vienna-based artist’s work, specifically in his voluminous “drawings” in three dimensions. Once again, Panzer focuses on the outline: Using wire, the artist re-creates the contours of objects and then covers parts of these structures with more wire. Panzer’s works were once described by Klaus Hoffer as “illusions or mock-ups of reality,” a description that continues to resonate with the artist’s current work.

• 

  print February 2007

  Lois Renner

  Lois Renner has become known for his large-format color photographs of interior spaces brimming with ordinary objects like fire extinguishers, ladders, workbenches, and tools. Only upon close observation can one see that these spaces are fictive constructs, photographed in a five-foot-high model made by the artist, who now lives in Vienna, of his former studio in Salzburg. Over the years, the artist’s displacements and duplications of spatial planes have become increasingly complex—in addition to these views of the model studio, Renner has also been using paint to create his fictions. He

• 

  picks December 12, 2006

  Lynne Cohen and Candida Höfer

  Though Lynne Cohen is from North America and Candida Höfer from Germany, both were born in 1944, work with photography, and focus on interior spaces devoid of people. This fascinating show brings together their large-format photography for the first time. Here, commonalities of motif, medium, and format soon become evidence of difference. For instance, Höfer uses only color photography, while much of Cohen’s work is significantly smaller and in black-and-white. The key distinction, however, lies in their unique choices of motif: Höfer photographs public spaces like foyers, libraries, and museums,

• 

  print December 2006

  Constantin Luser

  For six weeks, Constantin Luser lived and worked in the Christine König Galerie and filled 132 pieces of paper nailed to the wall with drawings in green and black fineliner. Even the panes of the display windows became part of his “Panoptikum,” as the exhibition was called. The drawings were like pages of a mental diary where chains of association emerge, dovetailing events and discoveries, where images reminiscent of anatomical or technical drawings mix with phrases like “field of attention,” “community-cloud,” and “thought-wanderings”—concepts that circle around the artist’s activity

• 

  picks November 30, 2006

  Imogen Stidworthy

  British-born Imogen Stidworthy belongs to that small circle of artists already selected to participate in the forthcoming Documenta 12; here she is showing three video works that explore both language and its absence. In To, 1996, we observe Stidworthy and her father on two monitors. On one, she takes notes on a monologue he recites; on the other, we see him seated naked in the same room as if posing for a portrait. A similarly fraught and powerful encounter is at the center of Substitutes, 2002. Here, words are scrambled as the sound track alternates between voices murmuring in five distinct

• 

  picks October 04, 2006

  Robert Barry

  The words DESIRE and REMIND, written in green, semitransparent letters, run diagonally across the two street-facing windows of this gallery’s new premises on Eschenbachgasse. Inside, the glittering words SUGGEST, ALMOST, and ABSURD, rendered in silver vinyl, have been affixed to the wall. They reflect light, appear to float free from the wall, and create an almost devotional atmosphere. Three monochrome paintings intensify this impression, and the words they harbor can only be perceived after a careful perusal. In another room, Barry presents a video of a train journey from Brussels to Paris.

• 

  picks September 20, 2006

  Judith Eisler

  In titling her solo exhibition in Vienna “Anhauchen” (To Breathe On), New York–based artist Judith Eisler conjures a subject rife with philosophical import. While no direct equivalent exists in English, the word, more common in poetry than in conversational German, suggests a form of breathing out, a brief, intense meeting of interior and exterior. The artist begins her process by playing videotapes of films (such as the Heddy Lamarr classic Ecstasy [1933] and David Cronenberg’s Crash [1996]), pausing them to photograph the screen at moments external to the film’s explicit narrative; for this

• 

  picks June 13, 2006

  Agnieszka Kalinowska

  Polish artist Agnieszka Kalinowska's sculptures and video installations engage the decisive moment at which human will meets intense adversity. In her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Kalinowska has placed her installation Beware! Insulation, 2002, in the window facing the street. The piece consists of sixty figures created from sculpted duct tape, which, suspended by strips of the very material of which they are made, resemble workers hanging from power lines. Once inside, the viewer encounters the dual video projection Great Scene, 2005, in which the artist waits for hours in front of