Heimo Zobernig

Painting, along with sculpture, film, performance, and design, is a central component of the intermedia art of Heimo Zobernig. Since the beginning of his artistic practice in the early 1980s, the artist has built up a comprehensive painterly oeuvre, always based on his attempt to explore color like a “scientist.”  Thus, in Zobernig’s work, painting has become a machine for the creation of insight. Characteristics of the artist’s method in this context are strategies of simplification, standardization, and systematization using predefined rules and the artistic appropriation of industrial norms and widespread samples (such as TV test patterns).

After mumok’s presentation of the consistent and yet utter multifaceted development of the artist in the first retrospective in winter 2002/2003, the new show will place its emphasis on Zobernig’s extended concept of painting, with select recent groups of works. The artist designed the exhibition architecture himself. With it, Zobernig references the classical-modernist architecture of the Sonsbeek Pavilion, which the Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld created for a sculpture presentation in Arnheim in 1955.

Art appears as a vast, contradictory field of research in Heimo Zobernig’s work—to which one must relate in a variety of ways. Art appears as both a demonstration item and the object of analysis. Early on, the artist described himself in this regard as a “historian” and “scientist.” In keeping with this image, Zobernig’s artistic investigations take place on almost all levels and are devoted to details as well as the greater whole. The artist forms his own analytical system and focuses on the interplay of aesthetics and society—asking under what conditions art is ready to emerge. “My aesthetic, my art, is the result of my work; it evolves when I question and knead content and style long enough to reach a valid form and don’t follow any theoretical models but think for myself.”

Processes of artistic production and material aesthetics as well as the examination of display and architecture or the challenge of the working mechanisms of museums and galleries can all be found in Heimo Zobernig’s work. Even the catalogues’ graphic design is subject to this system and thus becomes an important part of Zobernig’s artistic practice. His own role as an artist appears like an attitude in motion that he constantly explores and develops.

The publication, (co-)designed by Heimo Zobernig, is a conceptual companion piece to the book accompanying the 2003 retrospective, which Zobernig humorously titled Katerlog—a formal counterpart, as the artist again uses the Din-A4 format and the Helvetica font, but also—and importantly—a companion in terms of content, as it continues the painstakingly encyclopedic lists of Zobernig’s artistic work and exhibition practice up to the very date of publication (albeit absent any claims to completeness). The publication thus spans Zobernig’s wide range of artistry and media, while at the same time keeping a skeptical tongue in cheek regarding any attempt to be “scientific” about an artistic oeuvre.

Along with short descriptions of the installations and exhibitions from 2003 to 2020 and numerous illustrations, the comprehensive, approximately 400-page publication will contain a preface by Karola Kraus and in-depth essays by renowned international authors—from Manuela Ammer, Beatrice von Bismarck, and Helmut Draxler to Hans-Jürgen Hafner. Dorothea Brunialti, who has been accompanying Zobernig’s work for many years, has signed on to do the catalogue’s graphic design. There will be an English and a German edition of the book, both of them published by Walther König, Cologne.

Curated by Karola Kraus.

Contact
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For further information please contact: Katharina Murschetz, T +43 (0) 1 52500 1400 / press@mumok.at