Oliver Laric: Photoplastik / Gerald Domenig: Awåragaude? / James Lee Byars: Perfect Moments. An Exchange of Ideas with Gerhard Johann Lischka

Oliver Laric
Photoplastik

Oliver Laric’s exhibition transforms the Secession’s main hall into a sculptural grand assembly, bringing together works across the ages from antiquity to the present. Most of the 3D-printed objects bear a close relationship to Vienna, where Laric took his 3D scanner to public settings as well as renowned institutions including the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Albertina, and the University of Vienna’s Institute of Classical Archaeology to digitize a large number of objects.

The selection is informed by Laric’s current research into the history and development of 3D technology as well as the increasingly heated contentions over authorship in the digital age: in today’s internet culture, where content and information circulate and are recycled beyond anyone’s control, anarchic structures effectively render the notion of singular authorship moot. That is why a vital component of his show will be installed not in the gallery but online: Laric makes the 3D data derived from the objects on display, as well as many others he scanned as part of the preparations for the exhibition, available for free download. The question of copyright and the public domain has long been a central concern for the artist, who has been negotiating with collections and museums—especially public ones—to provide unrestricted access to their holdings.

The exhibition’s title refers to Eduard Kuchinka’s book Die Photoplastik: Herstellung photographischer Skulpturen und Reliefs und ähnliche Verfahren (Photoplastics: The Manufacture of Photographic Sculptures and Reliefs and Similar Processes, 1926). Mentioned in it is François Willème, a French artist who, in 1860, took out a patent on a precursor of today’s 3D scan technology and who also left his mark in Vienna.

An artist’s book designed by Oliver Laric will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.

Oliver Laric was born in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1981 and lives and works in Berlin.

Curator: Bettina Spörr

With the generous support of Arbeiterkammer Wien

Gerald Domenig
Awåragaude?

Photography, drawing, and writing are the preferred genres of Gerald Domenig. He has worked in these media since the 1970s, building a sizable oeuvre distinguished by formal consistency and thematic openness. In Domenig’s work, drawing and photography figure as two registers that serve diametrically opposed purposes with regard to a construction of reality. His drawings are intended as drafts or preliminary sketches for photographs: working with the pencil may be conceived as a tentative exploration of the world. By contrast, the photographs—most of them are black and white—aiming at more than a rendition of reality, are always self-contained images of a situation or place. Domenig, who uses an analog camera, develops the films by hand, and makes his own prints, sees photography as a technique of visual construction, of the transformation of space into surface.

Recurrent motifs include coats, trousers, houses, cars—everyday things, found objects, like the pair of gloves a child must have lost in the street. What he finds in small things he then recreates in his studio, in staged scenes that aim for the greatest possible simplicity and starkness. Unprepossessing façades of houses that bear the traces of structural alterations, surfaces of non-places in which he discovers painterly details are of particular interest to the artist.

Domenig’s work on his pictures goes hand in hand with an ongoing production of texts: lectures, speeches, and catalogue essays that combine reflections on his art with anecdotal elements. The artist’s book titled Mittendrin ein Z containing photographs and an extensive new text by Gerald Domenig will be published in conjunction with his first institutional solo exhibition in Austria.

Gerald Domenig, born in Villach in 1953, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main.

Curator: Jeanette Pacher

James Lee Byars
Perfect Moments. An Exchange of Ideas with Gerhard Johann Lischka

The exhibition pays homage to one of the 20th century’s most extraordinary artists. A performer and visionary, James Lee Byars (Detroit, 1932–Cairo, 1997) pursued his idea of art of the moment by continually probing the bounds of immateriality and delighting friends and acquaintances with a steady stream of letters and other missives. The show presents documents, objects, and ephemera associated with his art from the collection of Marianne Milani (Berne) that illustrate James Lee Byars’s acrobatic thinking in the example of his dialogue with the Berne-based artist-philosopher Gerhard Johann Lischka. Characteristic of their exchange is for instance a letter from the mid-1970s: Byars wrote the words "It is plain that each moment in its totality causes the next moment" in the centre of a circular piece of white tissue paper. He then crumpled it up and threw the little ball towards its receiver.

Press
Press conference: April 20, 10am
For interview requests and any other questions please contact: katharina.schniebs@secession.at
Please find the press releases and images for download here from April 20, 2016.