Parallel to the exhibition in the Austrian Pavilion in Venice this year, a landmark publication titled
Austria and the Venice Biennale 1895-2013 will be launched in Vienna today. This scholarly, 540-page publication presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of each individual exhibition, with the help of previously unpublished photographs, plans and correspondence drawn from public and private archives in many different countries, including the extensive holdings of the Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee (ASAC), Venice.

The list of artists that have represented Austria at the Venice Biennale over the last 120 years includes many of the leading figures of its cultural avant-garde: from Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oscar Kokoschka, through Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Arnulf Rainer and Walter Pichler to Valie Export, Maria Lassnig and Franz West. Its commissioners, given the responsibility of organising their exhibitions, have included individuals such as Josef Hoffmann, Otto Benesch, Hans Hollein, Peter Weibel and Kasper König.

Initiated and edited by this year’s commissioner, Jasper Sharp, the book includes extended essays by historian Philipp Blom and Rainald Franz (MAK), and an extensive illustrated chronology accompanied by short texts by Susanne Neuburger (mumok), Harald Krejci (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere), Antonia Hoerschelmann (Albertina), Günther Holler-Schuster (Neue Galerie, Graz), and Martin Hochleitner (Salzburg Museum).

The book has been designed by leading Austrian graphic designer Martha Stutteregger, and published by Verlag für moderne Kunst in both German and English languages. It will be launched at the Secession, Vienna, today, Monday, 29th April 2013, at 6:30pm.

The exhibition in the Austrian Pavilion in Venice will present new work by artist Mathias Poledna, and will open on Wednesday 29th May at 3:30pm.

For media enquiries please contact: 
Klara M. Piza
press@labiennalevenezia.at
T +43 699 10 83 74 00

The artist Mathias Poledna will represent Austria at the Venice Biennale in 2013. His selection was announced by Commissioner Jasper Sharp at a press conference in Vienna. Poledna will present a solo exhibition of new work in the Austrian Pavilion.

Born in Vienna in 1965, Mathias Poledna has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2000. His work examines the interconnections between art and entertainment, modernity in architecture and design, the language of film, cinema, and the process of image-making in our culture. Often informed by extensive research, his projects of recent years have taken the form of minimal and highly evocative film installations that suggest a complex tension between their visceral attraction and concepts circulating around them. Poledna’s work is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; MUMOK, Vienna; and the Generali Foundation, Vienna; among others.

To accompany the exhibition in the Austrian Pavilion, a landmark publication examining Austria’s participation at the Venice Biennale from 1895 to today, is currently being prepared. This scholarly, 400-page book will present, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of each individual exhibition, with the help of previously unpublished photographs, plans, and correspondence drawn from public and private archives in several different countries. The book will be launched in May 2013.

For media enquiries please contact:
Klara M. Piza: press@labiennalevenezia.at / T +43 699 10 83 74 00.

Mathias Poledna, artist
Solo exhibitions include: Secession, Vienna (2013); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2012); Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2012); Raven Row, London (with Florian Pumhösl, 2011); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2010); Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2010); New Museum, New York (2009); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2007); Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2006); Richard Telles Fine Art (2005); and MUMOK, Vienna (2003). Recent group exhibitions include: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Warsaw Museum of Modern Art; Musée Rodin, Paris; Secession, Vienna. Poledna also participated in the Yokohama Triennial (2008); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2006); the Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool (2004); the 3. Berlin Biennale (2004); and Manifesta 1, Rotterdam (1996).

Jasper Sharp, commissioner
Jasper Sharp (b. 1975) is a British art historian and curator. He worked from 1999–2005 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and has lived in Vienna since 2006. He is Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where he is currently preparing exhibitions of the work of Joseph Cornell, Ed Ruscha, and Lucian Freud. He is an advisor to the Outset Contemporary Art Fund and curator of the talks programme for the inaugural Frieze Masters in London in October 2012.

Eva Schlegel is pleased to announce that Markus Schinwald will represent Austria at the 54th Biennale di Venezia in the Austrian Pavilion.

Markus Schinwald engages in his work with the human body and the way it is embedded in the cultural context as well as a psychological analysis of the space that surrounds it. The dynamics of the individual and the collective, which are frequently dominated by constraints and anxiety, are expressed in the various media with which Schinwald works in the form of alienation, fragmentation and rifts. He explores the normal and its perception on the basis of films, sculptures, the design of clothes or the reworking of old paintings and lithographic prints where the subjects are manipulated and altered to open up new levels of reality and experience. The aestheticised images stand in contrast to the gaps that are evoked and the shifts in narrative while also being a product of the intermingling of reality, experience and perception.

This approach also makes itself felt in his Biennale contribution: the viewer turns into a performer, the pavilion into a closed stage. By dissecting the interior space along vertical axes, a new mode of perception emerges which makes the human body its structural frame of reference: “Although these constructional components are of course architectural elements, it suggested itself to use psychoanalytical terms for a concise definition; after all, the space created is dissociative rather than actually fragmented: claustrophobic above and nothing below. Or, if you will, the mind in neurosis, the crotch in psychosis. However, unlike in the spatial sculptures of Bruce Nauman or Robert Morris, the space intervention is not an autonomous act here, but also a kind of stage system or environment for the display of different works. It is, for one thing, an attempt to establish various different elements and, at the same time, to avoid explicit categorizations through contrastive positioning,” Markus Schinwald explains.

Approaching Venice
The Austrian contribution is accompanied by the video platform Approaching Venice, which launches on 26 January 2011. Eva Schlegel, commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion for the 54th Biennale di Venezia and initiator of the platform, invites well-known personalities from the fields of art and architecture to participate in a conversation. Nine interviews with leading artists, museum directors, curators, architects and critics form the basis for the theoretical engagement with the Biennale as a major event. Consideration has also been given to Director Bice Curiger’s overall theme for this year’s Biennale, ILLUMInations.
The videos are available online as downloads and podcasts at www.labiennale.at, and will be updated at fortnightly intervals from 26 January until the end of May 2011 both on the homepage and on Facebook. The interviews will also be streamed for smartphones on youtube.

Artist
Markus Schinwald, born in 1973 in Salzburg, Austria, lives and works in Vienna and Los Angeles, and is one of Austria’s most emerging contemporary artists. He has had numerous solo shows, including at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2009), Műcsarnok Kunsthalle Budapest (2009), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2008), Augarten Contemporary, Vienna (2007), Aspen Art Museum (2006) and the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2004). His works are to be found in numerous international collections, including at Tate Modern, London, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, Kunsthaus Zürich and the MUMOK — Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.

Commissioner
In April 2010, Eva Schlegel was appointed commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion at the 54th Biennale di Venezia by Federal Minister for Education, the Arts and Culture Dr. Claudia Schmied.

Eva Schlegel is an artist and lives and works in Vienna. She studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and held the position of Professor of Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1997 to 2006. Her works have been regularly presented in exhibitions both in Austria and internationally, including the Biennale di Venezia (1995), the Novartis Campus in Basel (2007) and the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, (2008). Most recently, her major solo exhibition titled “In Between” opened at the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna) in early December 2010, simultaneous to an exhibition at Galerie Krinzinger. Aside from her own comprehensive art work, Eva Schlegel has also curated numerous exhibitions which moved non-conformist and younger positions into the focus of the art-viewing public.

Press information at www.labiennale.at or by contacting Christina Werner, T +43 1 524 96 46 – 22, press@labiennale.at.

On behalf of the Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture