2018 PREVIEW EXHIBITION PROGRAMME

February 9 – April 22, 2018 Rudolf Polanszky, Hauptraum February 9 – April 1, 2018 Haris Epaminonda, Grafisches Kabinett Press conference: Thursday, February 8, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, February 8, 2018, 7 p.m.

April 13 – June 17, 2018 Bouchra Khalili, Galerie April 13 – June 3, 2018 Elaine Reichek, Grafisches Kabinett Press conference: Thursday, April 12, 2018, 11 a.m. Opening: Thursday, April 12, 2018, 7 p.m.

June 29 – September 2, 2018 Group exhibition curated by Anthony Huberman Hauptraum, Gallery, Grafisches Kabinett Press conference: Thursday, June 28, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, June 28, 2018, 7 p.m.

September 14 – November 4, 2018 Anthea Hamilton, Hauptraum Anne Speier, Galerie James Richards & Leslie Thornton, Grafisches Kabinett Press conference: Thursday, September 13, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, September 13, 2018, 6:30 p.m.

November 16, 2018 – January 20, 2019 Ed Ruscha, Hauptraum Philipp Timischl, Galerie Kris Lemsalu, Grafisches Kabinett Press conference: Thursday, November 15, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, November 15, 2018, 7 p.m.

Permanent presentation: Gustav Klimt – The Beethoven Frieze (1902)

Changes brought about by Renovation Work in 2017/2018 The Secession will remain open to visitors and continue to present exhibitions during the renovations. However, for technical reasons, selected areas will be closed intermittently.

June 29 – September 2, 2018 Other Mechanisms Group exhibition curated by Anthony Huberman

Press conference: Thursday, June 28, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, June 28, 2018, 7 p.m.

Lutz Bacher, Menu, 2002, mixed media Collection of Robin Wright

In the summer of 2018, the curator Anthony Huberman will propose a group exhibition that will take up all three of the building’s exhibition areas. Titled Other Mechanisms, Huberman’s exhibition for the Secession considers the way artists work with and within mechanisms. Broadly defined, a mechanism refers to machines, tools, or devices, but also to the more abstract system of standards, protocols, or parameters that structure much of today’s economic and political administration and management. The works in the exhibition reflect on the way machines are not only physical objects but have become infrastructural, a part of the technological present that is more difficult to shut down or turn off. The exhibition examines how art might contest a world that values efficiency and productivity by including works that test existing systems with inefficient machines, impossible tools, wasted time, and elaborate protocols that misalign outputs from their inputs.

Building on Mechanisms, presented at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco (October 2017–February 2018), Huberman’s show at the Secession will elaborate on his curatorial research and develop it in new directions. While aspects of both exhibitions will overlap, the display at the Secession will involve a range of new perspectives, additional artists, and a consideration of the local Viennese context.

Huberman has been director and chief curator of the Wattis Institute, San Francisco, since 2013. In 2010, he established the Artist’s Institute, in New York, where he developed a model for longer-term seasons dedicated to the work of individual artists. Huberman’s previous appointments included stints at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, SculptureCenter, New York, and MoMA PS1, New York.

Anthony Huberman, born in 1975 in Geneva, lives and works in San Francisco.

Invited by the board of the Secession Curator: Anthony Huberman Project management: Jeanette Pacher

September 14 – November 4, 2018 Anthea Hamilton

Press conference: Thursday, September 13, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, September 13, 2018, 6:30 p.m.

Anthea Hamilton, Reimagines Kettle’s Yard, 2016, exhibition view The Hepworth Wakefield. Courtesy the artist, Kettle’s Yard and The Hepworth Wakefield, Photo: Stuart Whipps

The British artist Anthea Hamilton’s interdisciplinary interest in performance is evident in her three- dimensional arrangements, theatrical ensembles whose tableau-like quality makes them reminiscent of stage sceneries or film sets. Her sculptures, idiosyncratic constructions precariously balanced between emergence and collapse, function like props for stories that remain to be told.

The work of the artist, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2016, grows out of wide-ranging research, whether she explores strands in cultural history such as the roots of 1970s disco, art-historical references like Art Nouveau, Italian furniture design or ancient Japanese theatre, documentary photography or lichen. Each subject is studied closely and used as a lens through which to understand the world.

Asked about her sources of inspiration, Hamilton has frequently mentioned the French writer Antonin Artaud and his idea of a “physical knowledge of images.” It is this bodily response to an idea or an image that she wants us to experience when we encounter her work and its use of unexpected materials, scale and humour; like the off-kilter proportions of the various elements, they attest to the fine sense of humour that sustains her art. Many of her installations incorporate objects that caught her attention because of

their tactile qualities or fascinating oddness. Other works grow out of autobiographical references and allusions to Hamilton’s own body; cut-outs of her legs have come to be regarded as a leitmotif in her oeuvre.

Anthea Hamilton, born in 1978 in London, lives and works in London.

The exhibition program is conceived by the board of the Secession. Curator: Jeanette Pacher

Exhibition cooperation:

The exhibition of Anthea Hamilton is being produced in cooperation with Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art.

September 14 – November 4, 2018

Anne Speier

Press conference: Thursday, September 13, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, September 13, 2018, 6:30 p.m.

Anne Speier, Runner being ahead of her time, 2015, Courtesy the artist and Meyer Kainer

Anne Speier makes art in two dimensions, working in painting, photography, collage, analog printing techniques, and digital image editing, but she also creates installations and sculptures, often revisiting characters from her pictures and transferring them into three-dimensional space. Speier’s representational and figurative visual idiom grows out of experimental interactions between different media such as photography, painting, and various printing techniques. The specific characteristics and material requirements of the techniques she employs leave traces that are no less integral to her compositions than their subjects proper. Blending painting, photography, printing, and cutout techniques, the artist furnishes multilayered stages on which social roles are enacted. The protagonists of Speier’s visual worlds are often female, androgynous, or sexless. Their appearance is mutable, varying between bulkily amorphous figures and comedic illustrations whom she lends individual personalities by endowing them with characteristic facial expressions or unusual gestures.

Anne Speier, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1977, studied at Frankfurt’s Städelschule. She currently lives in Vienna, where she teaches in the Object Sculpture Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The exhibition program is conceived by the board of the Secession. Curator: Bettina Spörr

September 14 – November 4, 2018 James Richards & Leslie Thornton

Press conference: Thursday, September 13, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, September 13, 2018, 6:30 p.m.

James Richards and Leslie Thornton, Crossing, video still, digital video, 19 min. 12 sec., 2016. Courtesy die Künstlerin and Rodeo, London

Belonging to two distinct artist generations and contexts, James Richards and Leslie Thornton developed their first collaborative project Crossings in 2016. This video installation materializes an intense phase of exchange between the artists, both enabled and limited by exchanging footage via online sharing platforms. Thornton, a media artist who herself was influenced by Paul Sharits, Yvonne Rainer, and Joan Jonas often deploys projections complicated by ample sound-image interactions. Likewise, musical composition is key to Richard’s practice. Both artists’ work is motivated by their understanding of cinema and video as original languages and forms of thinking.

The work’s title evokes the artists’ mode of working together, traversing their practices and sharing their views. Equally, it alludes to CROSSROADS (1976), a short film by Bruce Conner that reworks footage of the U.S. 1946 nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll. Conner confronts the viewer with slow-motion imagery which is at times out of sync with a soundtrack composed by experimental music pioneers. Similarly, the strictly organized frame of Richard and Thornton’s video allows the artists to juxtapose, modulate, and iterate recurring image fragments and sonic impulses. Assembled from both found material and original footage from their own extensive archives, Crossings moves through multiple stages and eventually morphs into an audiovisual note on artistic production and collaboration. (Text: Christoph Chwatal)

Leslie Thornton born in 1951 in Knoxville (Tennessee), lives and works in New York. James Richards (born 1983) is a British artist who lives in and London.

The exhibition program is conceived by the board of the Secession. Curator: Annette Südbeck

November 16, 2018 – January 20, 2019 Ed Ruscha

Press conference: Thursday, November 15, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, November 15, 2018, 7 p.m.

Edward Ruscha, Went to Sleep..., 2011, acrylic on vellum, 39,4 x 39,4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery

Ed Ruscha has been one of the most influential American artists since the 1950s; his groundbreaking work has shaped our understanding of contemporary art. Disavowing the gestural painting of American abstract expressionism, he devised a creative practice between minimalism, Pop art, and conceptualism. Research, innovation, and experimentation as well as the emphasis on critical reason rather than emotional involvement define his style.

With works like Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1965), Ruscha put his stamp on the history of twentieth-century art. Taking sober-minded photographs and arranging them in indexical sequence in meticulously designed and self-published artist’s books, he compiled catalogues of life in Los Angeles and on the American West Coast that made him a pioneer of conceptual art. Ruscha’s paintings, which constitute the bulk of his oeuvre, stand out for their formal austerity and

rigor and his abstention from gestural and expressive forms. The American West and Los Angeles are his primary sources of motifs, which usually appear in combination with painted words or sentences. Besides Jasper Johns, Ruscha has mentioned Futurism and Dadaism as important points of reference in his work. The Futurists’ rejection of naturalism led them to champion the beauty of the world of technology and an idealized aesthetic of the machine, which they preferred over natural objects. Even more than the works of the Italian Futurists, Dadaist art appealed to Ruscha with its play with the absurd and paradoxical.

Making similar work around the same time, artists including John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Jan Dibbets, and John Hilliard who appeared on the scene in the late 1960s and were grouped together under the label conceptual art adopted Ruscha’s ostensibly banal procedures with their characteristic blend of irony and pseudo-scientific accuracy and refined them in various ways. With his conceptual approach to photography and choice of motifs rather than his demotion of the medium to a mere instrument of recording, he has also been an influential innovator in artistic photography.

Ed Ruscha born in 1937 in Omaha (Nebraska), lives and works in Los Angeles.

The exhibition program is conceived by the board of the Secession. Curator: Bettina Spörr

November 16, 2018 – January 20, 2019 Philipp Timischl

Press conference: Thursday, November 15, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, November 15, 2018, 7 p.m.

Philipp Timischl, Problems, installation view, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Lüneburg 2016. Courtesy the artist and Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Photo: Fred Dott

Philipp Timischl’s expansive multimedia tableaus combine personal notes from the humdrum of daily life with found materials to build narrative structures. Balancing between documentation and fiction, between the private and public spheres, they play with intimacy and self-reference. Major themes in Timischl’s art include the lasting influence of our roots, exclusion, and queerness in relation to social classes as well as the power dynamics between art and its audience.

One recurring media element that has already emerged as a signature feature of the young artist’s growing oeuvre are hybrid towers combining a flat-screen monitor with a canvas mounted directly above it. With their conjunction of two image fields, these sculptures echo traditional forms in the history of art such as the diptych or collage. Timischl’s installations usually play out on several such towers. The seamless fusion of painting and technology extends to the motifs as well. The interplay between static

and time-based digital images weaves dense textures, although the disparate visual material does not congeal into a single unified narrative, which is merely hinted at in the manner of vignettes.

A similar play with ambivalence is evident in the titles of Timischl’s exhibitions: consider Philipp, I have the feeling I’m incredibly good looking, but have nothing to say (21er Haus, Vienna, 2013), They were treating me like an object. As if I were some sextoy or shit. I don’t wanna see them again (Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, 2014–15), or Hostile Habits Domestic Monuments, Class Drag (Galerie Layr, Vienna, 2017). Like many of the titles he chooses for his works, they quote a variety of sources including TV shows, books, movies, as well as conversations he happens to overhear in the street.

Philipp Timischl, born in 1989 in Graz (Austria), lives and works in Vienna.

The exhibition program is conceived by the board of the Secession. Curator: Annette Südbeck

November 16, 2018 – January 20, 2019 Kris Lemsalu

Press conference: Thursday, November 15, 2018, 10 a.m. Opening: Thursday, November 15, 2018, 7 p.m.

Kris Lemsalu, Father is in town, 2012

The Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu creates sculptures, installations, and performances that fuse the animal kingdom with humankind, nature with the artificial, beauty with repulsion, lightness with gravity, life with death. She combines animal bodies and porcelain objects with found (natural) materials such as furs, leather, seashells, wool, or paper in theatrical installations that whisk us off into a world of the fantastic imagination. Endeavoring to erase any distance between herself and her objects, the artist also uses her installations as stages for performance pieces in her sculptures become an integral part of her attire. Although Lemsalu’s work often broaches dark and raw themes, it feels fragile and delicate, incorporating references to ancient mythologies and rituals from various cultures. In addition to abstract sculptures, her art also includes self-portraits and photographs, many of which depict her as a creature with masculine as well as feminine traits. Combining fabrics, makeup, wigs, and other props, she creates short-lived exotic identities for herself.

Kris Lemsalu studied ceramics at the Estonian Academy of Arts, , and art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, , and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Kris Lemsalu born in 1985, lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia and Berlin.

The exhibition program is conceived by the board of the Secession. Curator: Annette Südbeck; Assistant: Verena Österreicher

For any further information:

Contact Karin Jaschke T. +43 1 587 53 07-10 F. +43 1 587 53 07-34 E-Mail: [email protected] secession Vereinigung bildender KünstlerInnen Wiener Secession Friedrichstraße 12, A-1010 Wien T. +43-1-587 53 07, F. +43-1-587 53 07-34 [email protected], www.secession.at Öffnungszeiten: Dienstag–Sonntag 10–18 Uhr Permanente Präsentation: Gustav Klimt, Beethovenfries