Hans Kupelwieser
Postemedial Sculputres
08 May – 20 June 2004
Neue Galerie Graz
Sackstrasse 16
A-8010 Graz
tel ++43-316-82 91 55
fax ++43-316-81 54 01
Opening: May 07th 2004, 7 pm
Contemporary sculpture in its widest context is characterised by breaching conventional bounds in the fields of operation and material selection. The Austrian artist Hans Kupelwieser having studied under Bazon Brock and Peter Weibel at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna, has always worked mainly in the latter field. He includes new materials, not only as basic material for experimentation like in arte povera, but also operating with new meanings of the material in a kind of linguistic fashion.
This intertwining of material and operational enlargement between form and function is Hans Kupelwieser’s field of analysis. In his current inflated sculptures, (“Gonflables”), of which one received a definite place in the Austrian Sculpture Park near Graz, the material is not formable PVC sheets but rather Aluminium. The material simulates a function that does not exist in reality.
Illusions of material and function constitute an independent thread in the complex fabric of contemporary sculpture. Kupelwieser continues to develop this thread by making the sculpture ultimately float. After its presentation in 1994 in MAK, Vienna, one of these alloy sculptures will stand in the baroque inner courtyard of Neue Galerie, forming the prologue to this large personal exhibition. The exhibition will give an overview of the latest topical creative period with some reference works from earlier years.
His photographic works such as photograms are on an equal level with, and closely related to, his sculptures. They are indexical representations of objects, referring to traces left by objects and dealing with the fundamental question of how objects become images; hence a classical question in painting, resolved by Kupelwieser not through painting but by means of media and sculpture. In this way he succeeded in creating a third individual genre in contemporary Austrian sculpture between Erwin Wurm and Franz West, clearly diverting away from the epoch of abstraction and representing an important further development of the concept of sculpture in post-modernism.