Month of Photography
FACE TO FACE WITH THE AVANT-GARDE: Vienna - Paris - New York

Opening: November 18, 2010 at 7 p.m.
Kiesler Foundation Vienna, Mariahilferstraße 1b, 1060 Vienna
19/11/2010 - 11/2/2011 Monday-Friday: 10 am-5 pm
e x t e n d e d until 15/2/2011

The exhibition “Avantgarde im Portrait: Wien - Paris - New York” focuses for the first time in the brief exhibition tradition of the Kiesler Foundation Vienna on the special importance of the photography medium for Frederick Kiesler’s life and work. The approximately 4100 photographs held by the Kiesler Archive not only testify to the extraordinary function that the artist-architect Kiesler attached to the photographic image to depict the “making of” in the course of artistic production. These documents also highlight the eventful development of an “artistic community” that, as the avant-garde, would come to write twentieth-century art history in Vienna, Paris and New York!
Numerous photographs, for example, demonstrate the wide-ranging network of personal relationships of which Frederick Kiesler and his first wife Stefi were part. Photos from the early 1920s show the Kieslers with the most renowned exponents of the European and American avant-garde – including Theo van Doesburg, Enrico Prampolini or Fernand Léger. In Paris, where Kiesler achieved his international breakthrough in 1925 with his “City in Space” exhibition design, he can be seen amidst the constructivists who had come together there.
Kiesler’s time in New York was influenced both by the “Surrealism in Exile” movement and by the younger scene of the “New York School” and the American expressionists – as evidenced in documents showing Kiesler with André Breton, Max Ernst, Hans Richter and Jean Arp as well as meetings of the New York artist community on Long Island.
Not only the list of artists depicted in the photos, but also of those behind the camera reads like a “who is who” of the international avant-garde, among them the most important photographers of the last century such as Denise Bellon, Duane Michals, Hans Namuth or Irving Penn.
The links between artists from architecture, fine arts, literature, theatre and photography evidenced by these historical photographs today are impressive proof of the seminal interplay of different disciplines of art – a challenge and an ambition that remains of undiminished relevance for contemporary socio-cultural developments.

The exhibition “Avantgarde im Portrait: Wien - Paris - New York” is accompanied by a booklet (German/English) with numerous illustrations and a preface by Monika Pessler, and a text by Gerd Zillner.

With the assistance of:
Cultural Department of the Town of Vienna
Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Art and Culture

Brochure here
The programme of Eyes On - The Month of Photography

HEIMO ZOBERNIG_DRAMADISPLAY

Opening: October 18, 2010 at 7 p.m.
Kiesler Foundation Vienna, Mariahilferstraße 1b, 1060 Vienna
(19/10 - 12/11/2010) Monday-Friday: 10 am-5 pm

The DRAMADISPLAY exhibition showcases works that not only reveal the similarities between Heimo Zobernig and the artist-architect Frederick Kiesler. The presentation of works by this year’s Kiesler Prize winner, above all an installation that almost bursts the seams of the room at the Kiesler Foundation Vienna, focuses above all on the historical development of the artistic environment.
Unlike Frederick Kiesler, who trusted in the potency of a catholic diversity of forms, Heimo Zobernig’s interventions seem characterised by moderate restraint. With economical means and subtle interventions, he explores the art object with regard to its causal function and purpose. The dramatic element of Zobernig’s works manifests itself in designs concentrated on a particular medium that, filled with inner tension, bond with their environment in a special manner.
The DRAMADISPLAY icon that he developed specially for the exhibition suggests that the artist is interested not only in the designed object itself. Specifically, Zobernig is concerned with the relationship between an object and its setting. The terms DRAMA and DISPLAY linked in the typography already symbolise the communicative interactions that take place between the work and its context.
Along with his graphic designs, Heimo Zobernig also examines the possibilities of representing artistic ideas with the aid of a steel object that is on show for the first time at the Kiesler Foundation Vienna. Prevailing art production conditions are also the subject of a video from 1999, a film focusing on the “Santa Maria della Scala” culture centre in Siena and on all those involved with it.
Institutional production mechanisms are the starting point of a pavilion built in 1998. This spatial installation of wooden battens and jute forges direct links to exhibitions staged in the past such as the Armory Show in New York in 1913. With this work, Heimo Zobernig ties modernist utopias in with Stanley Kubrick’s enactment of a “Space Odyssey” from 1968.
In a critical retracing of modernist expectations, however, Heimo Zobernig seals the previously open architecture, thus revealing it to be a mere construct of reality, a utopia – yet to be realised!

The exhibition HEIMO ZOBERNIG_DRAMADISPLAY is accompanied by a catalogue (German/English) with numerous illustrations and texts, the statement of the panel of judges of the 2010 Kiesler Prize, a preface by Dieter Bogner, and texts by Moritz Küng and Monika Pessler.

With the assistance of: Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Art and Culture

Brochure here

FROM CHICKEN WIRE TO WIRE FRAME
KIESLER'S ENDLESS HOUSE

E x t e n d e d until October 2, 2010

Opening: Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 7 p.m.
Kiesler Foundation Vienna, Mariahilferstraße 1b, 1060 Vienna
(11/6– 17/9/2010) Extended until October 2, 2010
Monday-Friday: 10 am-5 pm

Frederick Kiesler’s project of the Endless House is unparalleled one of the icons of the 20th century architecture. Based on the model of 1959 which is made out of chicken wire and concrete, his large format so called “galaxies” and Kiesler’s lyric poetry, the exhibition emphasizes on the utopian potential of his visionary architectural concepts.
To date, the endless house exerts a compelling fascination for architects as well as for artists. The Kiesler Foundation presents the recent research of the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts of a possible realisation of the endless house architecture by means of high tech tools: From Chicken Wire to Wire Frame!

Brochure here

POST-SUPREMATIST DATA SHEETS
by HEIDULF GERNGROSS

Opening on Tuesday, 4 May 2010, at 7 pm
Kiesler Foundation Vienna, Mariahilferstraße 1b, 1060 Vienna
5/5– 28/5/2010, Monday-Friday: 10 am-5 pm

The exhibition POST-SUPREMATIST DATA SHEETS at the Kiesler Foundation Vienna presents the innovative “conceptions of space” sketched by the architect Heidulf Gerngross in the early 1960s. Numerous sketches and worksheets that have so far never been before the public eye visualise an ongoing, continuous process of development that is of great importance with regard to the current production of architecture and design. These “records”, DATA SHEETS, are of such dynamic structure that they break out of their two-dimensional “frame” and morph into “spaces of action”.

The literal penetration and pervasion and the simultaneous processing of both the back and front of various image supports not only forge links to relevant artistic principles of representation of concept art and, above all, the Fluxus movement. The POST-SUPREMATIST statements also testify to the overcoming of the “non-objective feeling” that El Lissitzky and above all Malevich had called for in modernism.

Hence, the works of Heidulf Gerngross may be regarded as visual counterparts of a critical stance that was and is of paramount importance particularly for the development of the Austrian architectural scene during the past decades – as can be readily observed in numerous works of younger protagonists working at the interface of architecture, art and design. Consequently, the exhibition also showcases Gerngross’s latest design productions – the ARCHIQUANT ALLROUND, a modular design and architecture concept compressed into the form of a model. An “architectural particle” inseparably linked to the human being as a definition module for bodies and space that, in the sense of Frederick Kiesler’s comprehensive intentions, constitutes a unity of space and time or, in the sense of Heidulf Gerngross, an “orgastic soup”.

Brochure here

Supported by:

Bm: ukk
Galerie KONZETT

Opening: March 11, 2010 7 p.m.
Kiesler Foundation Vienna, Mariahilfer Straße 1b, 1060 Vienna/Austria

Duration: March 12, 2010 - April 30, 2010
Hours: Monday - Friday: 10 am - 5 pm

The presentation according to. on the practice of transformations by the artist Gilbert Bretterbauer is another opportunity to demonstrate the cross-genre orientation of the Kiesler Foundation Vienna institution. Specifically, its activities and projects address those positions of contemporary art, architecture and design production that, evoked by the classical avant-garde, continue to influence contemporary practice today.
The exhibition according to focuses above all on the fusion of different fields of artistic activity that – very much in the spirit of architect, designer and artist Frederick Kiesler – contributes to the erosion of different categories of art. Just as Kiesler’s concepts of art are closely interwoven with his universal perception of reality, so too does the work of Gilbert Bretterbauer combine a range of different fields of artistic activity like intercommunicating vessels. As a vital precondition for injecting dynamism into processes of production and thought in contemporary art, he develops strategies that draw on – and intermesh – forms of mediation from a variety of disciplines.
Thanks to Bretterbauer’s utilitarian worlds of images and representation, art undergoes a boom that impacts both within and outside of the realm of art. Hence, his work can be seen as both an accomplished statement and as a consequential effect of the critical examination of different categories of art and their modes of reception. Equally, Gilbert Bretterbauer’s transformation practice – his “artistic decorations" and “decorative art” – reflects a yearning for the marriage of the artistic and the commonplace, as has been formulated in numerous works of modernist artists. By dispensing with hierarchical boundaries between the profane and the elitist, the objects that Bretterbauer designs fit into the context of the Kiesler Foundation Vienna, creating seamless transitions between the spheres of art and the everyday.

PUBLIC SPACE WITH A ROOF (PSWAR)
from Amsterdam with
PASSAGES THROUGH (THE UNFINISHED MONUMENT)

Opening: November 17th, 2009, 7 pm
at the Kiesler Foundation Vienna
Mariahilfer Strasse 1b, 1060 Vienna/Austria

Duration: November 18th, 2009 - February 26th, 2010
Hours: Monday - Friday: 10 am - 5 pm

As important as the artwork itself is the way of its presentation, is the argument of PSWAR, Tamuna Chabashvili, Adi Hollander und Vesna Madzoski from Amsterdam . Hence, in their interdisciplinary work, they emphasize on the meaning and function of the art space itself. They focus on the mutual influence between the artwork and its space and the conditions of art perception in their artistic debate.

To devote space to the social and cultural parameters of architecture, arts and design, PSWAR create within their installation PASSAGES THROUGH (THE UNFINISHED MONUMENT) a symbiotic unit through the correlation of theory and practice as well as of historically significant and current art concepts.

We are very pleased to present the innovative work of Public Space With A Roof (PSWAR) for the first time in Austria . Not only does this work allow new interpretations of Kiesler’s œuvre, it is equally characteristic of contemporary working methods of the art of our time.

Brochure here

Supported by:
FOTOLEUTNER Fachlabor
PKF Centurion
Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien
Gesellschaft der Freunde der bildenden Künste