Kunsthalle Wien
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Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz #NineBuildingsStripped 13/11 2019 – 2/2 2020 Andreas Fogarasi’s art focuses on points of architectures, conducting a kind of “formal contact between visual culture—fine art, design, archaeology of the institutions” (Søren Grammel). architecture—and social reality. What do society, Nine Buildings, Stripped exemplifies this politics, or history “look like”? Where and how are focus on processes of urban transformation and the fundamental conditions underlying community their manifestation in surfaces. It is a concern life immediately recognizable in the thoroughly on which the more recent architectural history designed environments we pass through every of the exhibition’s venue has obvious bearing. day? The city with its manifold surfaces and The demolition of the distinctive yellow container- densely aggregated phenomena is a central like block of the first Kunsthalle Wien in 2001, and object of Fogarasi’s observations. In his two- the glass curtain wall pavilion that now occupies dimensional works, sculptures, installations, and the same site, make the institution a perfect videos, he scrutinizes the built urban space and showcase (in both senses of the word) for those its transformations in their political, economic, changes in the urban landscape that are exposed cultural, and sociological dimensions. He begins in condensed form in the works on display. The his inquiries by homing in on the readily accessible wall-mounted and freestanding “material packages” exterior layer, the structural shell, and the agents are composed of original fragments of buildings involved in shaping it, and then drills down toward that no longer exist, as well as samples or parts of the underlying substance: Where do the deep the visible exterior of the structures that replaced parameters of a society and time rise to the them or into which they were converted, including surface, to the façades of buildings, and their façade claddings, floor tiles, fragments of doors, visual as well as tactile details? To which extent and even complete windows. They present radically is an architectonic visuality part and parcel of a abstract portraits of specific urban situations across larger symbolic order, of a representational system time, reduced to the materiality, colors, and tactile of political and economic states of affairs? How do qualities of the physical shells. The artistic gesture of materiality and immateriality interact in a structure, packaging and strapping, meanwhile, disrupts the what is the relationship between physical reality aura of authenticity, subjecting the raw material to an and visual communication? What meanings additional transformation (in fact, into a work of art), gleam in that stone, that glass, that exposed and adding to each “package” a narrative stratum concrete? But also: Who was or is the architect, of meaning between freight, shipment, missive, which is to say, the author of a particular ensemble and gift, allowing moments of fictionalization and of surfaces and their overall aesthetic? narrative overtones to be heard in the works. These and similar questions outline the field Still, the documentary aspect predominates: surveyed by Fogarasi’s artistic research and The sculptural hybrids are urbanistic example mark key points of departure for his projects. cases whose individual characteristics coalesce In this respect, his work is implicitly based on into a representative image of an overarching the hypothesis that built space correlates with development. The quantitative limitation to nine lived space; in keeping with the theories of Henri buildings is of no particular significance, as Lefebvre or Pierre Bourdieu, the artist rejects the Fogarasi conceives of his project as fundamentally idea that the architectonic functions as a static open-ended and ongoing. Reflecting this global frame or container to which the social passively dimension, the selection of objects that were accommodates itself without affecting it in turn: demolished or converted covers a broad range of The basic configuration of how we live and think building functions, volumes, owners, and dates has immediate influence on how we build and not of construction: The materials for the packages just vice versa. were sourced from edifices that housed public One of Fogarasi’s best-known works, culture administrations and service industries, a railway and Leisure [Kultur und Freizeit], his award- station, a small block of flats, a movie theater winning contribution for the Hungarian pavilion complex, a pedestrian area, and a subterranean at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, accordingly passage. Most dated from between the 1950s and unfurls a closely-knit web of references: In calm the 1980s. The extendibility of the sculptural series, documentary images, the video installation paints especially in geographical terms, is prominently a detailed filmic portrait of six architecturally illustrated by the inclusion of the erstwhile Palace of distinctive cultural centers in Budapest. Built the Republic [Palast der Republik] in East Berlin and during—and in some instances before—the era the reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace [Berliner of communist rule, they originally served the Stadtschloss], which is nearing completion; they government-approved recreational pursuits of exemplify one of the project’s foci, on architectures local workers’ circles. After the fall of communism, that define the character of a neighborhood the buildings were swept up in the transformation or have greater public presence. Among the that seized virtually all domains of life and took reference buildings from Vienna are similarly iconic on new functions. In the wake of the concurrent architectures, including the “Rinterzelt,” a municipal creeping shift in the—social, cultural, and, waste-collection facility (whose 220-feet-tall silver most importantly, ideological—tenor of the tent-shaped roof construction was a landmark Cover: Andreas Fogarasi, Studio View, 2019, © Andreas Fogarasi & BILDRECHT GmbH, 2019 activities that take place in them, Fogarasi’s looming over the city’s northern districts for Courtesy of the artist, Photo: David Avazzadeh video installation scans the surfaces of the decades), the headquarters of a social insurance 1 company on Wiedner Hauptstraße, a structure from The question of what defines a cityscape, which the 1970s designed by Carl Appel that dominates is shaped by the competition between silhouette, the artist’s own neighborhood—it was one of the shape, skyline, and the surfaces they enclose— first objects he selected. Not one but two works are the feature Fogarasi champions. It ties in with the devoted to Vienna’s South Station [Südbahnhof], old question of the constitution of images as such, which was torn down in 2009/10 to make room of the rivalry between line and surface, between for the new Main Station [Hauptbahnhof] and the drawing and painting. new headquarters of Erste Bank—two of Vienna’s A similar distinction is evident, last but not most significant major construction projects of least, in the titular “stripping.” The removal recent years. of façade elements exposing the interiors of All in all, the exhibition with its wall and buildings is always a twofold intervention, floor sculptures sketches the contours of an both a concrete physical act and an expanded undertaking that is encyclopedic in its ambitions, documentary operation, generating a tension not unlike the photographic typologies of industrial that continues to animate the image in which the structures compiled by Bernd and Hilla Becher. components are joined. What we see on the walls Fogarasi’s accumulations of materials are and the floor is always both: Images in this space, contributions toward a comprehensive long-term in addition to spaces rendered in an image. It is documentation of architectural practice. The a dialectic that imparts an enduring and appealing visual and tactile superimposition of phases in the restlessness to Fogarasi’s fragmentary blocks— existence of a structure or site—in a physically between abstraction and concretion, surface and formally condensed recreation—yields a vivid and depth, past and present, material reality and portrayal of the complex design decisions behind pictorial signification. it: The people, the financial and technological factors, the historical circumstances, and the Curator shifting fashions that shaped it. What the beholder Maximilian Geymüller encounters is thus documentation of urban- architectural alteration in which the specific and Andreas Fogarasi (b. Vienna, 1977) lives and crucial shift comes into view only in the fusion works in Vienna. His work has been presented and direct comparative study of the materials. at institutions in numerous countries: Museo In this manner, Fogarasi’s works are markers and, Tamayo, Mexico City; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; what is more, embodiments of selected fractures New Museum, New York; Kunstverein für die in the concatenated sequence of urban design Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Muzej choices through which larger social, political, suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb; CAC, Vilnius; and cultural undercurrents emerge into view. Frankfurter Kunstverein; and Palais de Tokyo, Hewing to the documentary register, the artist Paris. Solo exhibitions (selection): Galerie Thomas does not pass value judgments or fetishize the Bernard, Paris (2018); Georg Kargl Fine Arts, buildings, abstaining from sentimentality as well Vienna (2017); Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City