Heinz Frank: The Angle of the End Always Comes from Behind

“My art is the in-between space between the inward void and outward inside,” states Heinz Frank, who has worked as a sculptor, draftsman, painter, creator of linguistic and object art, and, occasionally, designer of interiors and furniture. Accomplished in mobilizing multiple media, he interweaves materials by freely mixing and matching various matter such as wood, stone, plaster, paint, clay, glass, metal, and found fabrics. Combining, assembling, and transforming such elements with other objects or devices, for example wires, boxes, mirrors, or parts of old household appliances, Frank probes the tensions between polar opposites such as hard and soft, hot and cold, inside and outside, dense and lightweight, beginning and end, pinpointing in forever novel creations how all of these terms are intricately interconnected.

Language—specifically an “aphoristic conceit” that Frank has jotted down on a piece of paper—always serves as the beginning of his creative process. Later, his noted musings are displayed beside the final piece whose genesis they spark. The exhibition proffers an array of works (accompanied by these metaphorical expressions, and dating from different periods) collectively arranged in an installation specially conceived in relation to the spatial qualities of the site at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz.

Frank’s polymorphous conjunctions of linguistic and visual art transport the beholder into a world of ideas in which human existence, the origin and trajectory of thoughts, the body and inner life all coalesce as central themes. Frank presents reason and emotion as interdependent and therefore equipollent: What makes the human being human is the thought that is felt and vice versa. 

As tall as the artist himself, a series of painted folding-screens are positioned in front of one of the glass walls that surround the space. Alternately angled, the screens stand as movable walls, although they may not shield anything bar themselves. Each sports at least one hole, that “epitome of emptiness.” Double-sided painted pictures also hang on the inside of some of the glass panes, or the transparent “curtains” that enclose the hall. These paintings have holes too: “eyeholes,” for the figures painted, through which one can potentially catch glimpses of the emptiness inside the head, the outside exterior, or the interior space reflected behind them. In Frank’s words: “Wall-internal embodies wall-external,” or, as he proclaims, “Humans are the blurred windows on the outside.”

His installation also prominently features four sculptural creations placed on antique-looking rugs. Together with other sculptural objects, they form a surreal interior that reveals Frank as a deft juggler of madcap, poetically nested conceits and sallies, as well as an architect at home by the drafting table. The measure of his things, their proportions and relations to the space around them, hinges on the individual human being—and, therefore, the artist himself, as an embodied “I.”

Curator: Lucas Gehrmann

Heinz Frank (b. Vienna, 1939) studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He has been active as an artist since the 1960s. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions over the course of his artistic career, and is included in several national collections such as the mumok—museum of modern art, Vienna, the MAK—Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, and the Rupertinum, Salzburg.