Preview Exhibitions 2020 Press Release.Pdf
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Having Lived Ingeborg Strobl Press conference: Wednesday, March 4, 2020, 10 am Ingeborg Strobl’s oeuvre is moored in the tradition of conceptual and intermedia art. Opening: Natural and animal subjects acting as mirror images of society take up a central role Thursday, March 5, 2020, 7 pm in her objects, installations, collages, paintings, photographs, films, and publications. Duration of the exhibition: Also evident in her work is a predilection for the marginal, the hidden, that which is March 6 through Julne 21, 2020 all-too easy to overlook or repress as well as a concomitant aversion to obsessive production and consumption. Recognizing and valuing the peripheral is an aspect that also comes to the fore in the media in which she worked. Printed matter such as publications, posters, and invitation cards are themselves artistically rendered compo- nents of her oeuvre. Strobl donated her archive with numerous works and printed matter to mumok. This archival material is the centerpiece of the retrospective, which was conceived in col- laboration with the artist—before her death in April 2017—and gives a representative overview of her comprehensive oeuvre. Ingeborg Strobl The exhibition is focused on—previously rarely shown—early ceramics, which the Eat / Horse, 1996 ©1996 Ingeborg Strobl / artist created during her studies in London. Strobl’s sense of beauty that is hidden Bildrecht Wien in transient things as well as the fugacity of all magnificence is already manifest in Photo: © mumok these early works. In a multitude of detailed colored-pencil drawings from the 1970s, she translates the ceramic works’ surreal illusionism into the pictorial. With this, Strobl creates the foundation for the visual poetry that runs like a thread through her work— as it is characteristic of her paintings with collaged image and text inserts. These were in part conceived and created like diary-like “notes,” in which personal and private matter coalesce with contemporary history. On her travels to countries of the former Eastern Bloc, Asia, and Africa, Strobl com- bined her eye for nature with a focus on sociocultural and sociopolitical transitional scenarios. She primarily chose places where the ravages of time have left their marks. It is, for instance, particularly her photos and videos of rampant nature reclaiming and destroying traces of civilization that depict historical upheaval, such as the rapid societal changes in post-Communist Europe. Far from any escapism, her interest in decay, death, and finitude, which continually shines through in her work—for instance, in the myriad photographs of cemeteries—must be interpreted as an astute study of the living as well as a deep interest in the present and the things to come. Press contact Also in the production and dissemination of her filmic works, the artist circumvents Katharina Murschetz conventions of elaboration and exclusivity. Most of her videos are available publicly T +43 1 52500-1400 [email protected] on YouTube, on a channel named Inga Troger, her mother’s maiden name. All this assembles to form a jigsaw puzzle in which the ephemeral, the fragile, the seemingly Katja Kulidzhanova T +43 1 52500-1450 incidental—captured with subtle poetry and critical esprit—is actually the constant [email protected] and succinct element in her work. [email protected] www.mumok.at Her work’s irony-tinged rigor also shows in the use of language as a recurring artistic motif. Observations on the art scene and social developments are as much subject to mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien an artistic translation into language as are natural elements. Her photo novels blend Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna her penchant for films, photographs, and language in books. A catalogue with texts by Wolfgang Kos, Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Rainer Fuchs as well as an interview by Gabriele Jurjevec-Koller with Ingeborg Strobl will be publis- hed in conjunction with the exhibition. Biography Ingeborg Strobl (b. 1949, d. 2017) studied graphics at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 1967 to 1972. From 1972 to 1974, she attended the Royal College of Art in London, where she earned a master of arts degree in ceramics. In the 1970s, she predominantly worked in ceramics and graphic design. In 1987, she and Ona B., Evelyne Egerer, and Birgit Jürgenssen founded the feminist artist collective DIE DAMEN, of which she remained a member until 1992. From 1999 to 2001, Strobl taught design to art educators at the University of Applied Arts as a visiting professor. Solo exhibitions (selection): Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz (1974); Secession, Vien- na (1992); Galerie Stadtpark, Krems (1993); Kunsthaus Bregenz (1999); Fotogalerie Wien (2013); Wien Museum (2015); LENTOS Linz (2016) Awards: Art Prize of the City of Vienna for Graphic Design and painting (1993); Appreciation Award of the Province of Styria for Fine Art (2000); Appreciation Award for Artistic Photography of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Cul- ture (2008) Curated by Rainer Fuchs Steve Reinke: Butter Press conference: “My work wants me dead, I know. It is all it ever talks about,” writes Steve Reinke in a Wednesday, March 4, 2020, 10 am correspondence on the occasion of his exhibition at mumok. Death and life, empa- Opening: thy and cruelty, sex and intimacy—it’s the “big” questions the artist (born 1963 in Thursday, March 5, 2020, 7 pm Eganville, Canada; lives in Chicago, USA) is after in his work. In the best Nietzschean Duration of the exhibition: manner, however, Reinke considers human beings not political or moral entities but March 6 through June 21, 2020 puppets of microbiotic agendas: Instead of the Freudian ego and id, it is bacteria, placentae, and plankton that rule the world in his videos; “culture” designates not humanistic achievement but life in a petri dish. In his first solo museum show, Reinke presents his new video An Arrow Pointing to a Hole as well as a selection of sinister text images and absentminded needlepoints, all of which, in a paradoxically precise manner, tell stories of loss of control, formlessness, and self-abandon. As an artist and writer, Reinke is best known for his monolog-based videos, among them The Hundred Videos (1989–1996), which he programmatically conceived as an “early work.” In these five hours of video material, Reinke, by furnishing found, filmed, and animated images with confessional comments, blurs the boundary between Steve Reinke documentary and fiction, thus anticipating the narcissistic structure of our current Untitled (needlepoint), 2017 Courtesy courtesy of the artist and social media landscape. In 2006, Reinke started a new cycle titled Final Thoughts, to gallery Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin which the work presented at mumok also belongs and which will be concluded at the time of the artist’s death. Whereas questions of libido and Eros—that is, life-affirming principles—were often central in earlier works, Final Thoughts is dedicated to their an- tagonists. Reinke is considering the end of things—of language, consciousness, and experience—and thus of his own person. In the nocturnal monologue scene An Arrow Pointing to a Hole the artist is physically omnipresent—as a face, sonorous voice, and tattooed body—but the existence of a realm beyond this naked manifestation is categorically called into question. He lost his subconscious already as a boy, as the narrator wants us to believe, and since then, the chorus of his microbiome has been doing the talking: “My guts, my guts were humming. They have been humming ever since, and I mostly do whatever they say.” Has the prophecy come true? Is Reinke, the subject, dead? Hard to say. What is very much alive is his quest for dissolving the grammatical fiction of the “I”—for forms without structure, without a face, without perspective. Both Reinke’s text images and his needlepoints reify such yearning for a loss of form. Press contact Grounded in the practice of notetaking and doodling, they are images that refuse to Katharina Murschetz be images, strange hybrids of precise execution and nebulous contents. The drawi- T +43 1 52500-1400 [email protected] ngs of words and phrases on which the series of silkscreen prints Portfolio A, B, C, D (2016–2019) is based, for example, are made with ink dripping from an eyedropper. Katja Kulidzhanova T +43 1 52500-1450 The line is hard to control—painting rather than writing—and lends phrases such as [email protected] “Amoeba Navigates Labyrinth” or “Strong Corpse Weak Ghost” an erratic expression. The needlepoint embroideries Reinke has been making for about ten years are simi- [email protected] www.mumok.at larly contradictory objects—“really slow, crafty doodles,” as the artist writes. Reinke produces them without either plan or intention: One color follows another; patterns mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien emerge and are abandoned. The result is an innocent quasi-abstract object, its back Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna as important as its front, whose only function is to indicate killed time. The first book in the German-speaking world about Steve Reinke’s work will be published in conjunction with this exhibition. Along with a preface by the curator, the book will feature texts by Laura U. Marks, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Kerstin Stakemeier, Samo Tomšič, and Reinke himself. Thanks to the Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, Berlin, and the Alice Kaplan Institute of Humanities at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, for their support of this publication. Curated by Manuela Ammer Andy Warhol mumok Celebrates the Artist with Three Exhibitions in 2020 Press conference: From May 1, 2020, mumok will devote three exhibitions to the phenomenon that Wednesday, April 29, 2020, 10 am is Andy Warhol (b. August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA; d. February 22, 1987 in New Exhibition opening: York City).