Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Sin título [Untitled]

Image caption
HEIMO ZOBERNIG

Sin título [Untitled]

  • 2004
  • Oil and masking tape on blue, green and red Cromex fabric
  • 200 x 200 cm
  • Cat. P_759
  • Acquired in 2010
By:
Carlos Martín

Despite its appearance of being just speculatively geometric painting hobbled by the tenets of modern tradition, Heimo Zobernig’s work is of a complexity that draws on his ‘in-between’ activity, where architecture, performance, design, video, music and public art converge. Building on his interest in the linguistic aspects of painting, in the device of exhibition and in the staging inherent to the visual arts, Zobernig contests the way in which museums usually stage things, taking into account that art would cease to exist without it. Even though it is an apparently banal gesture, the significant aspect of that interest is the fact that works such as Untitled (2004) are intended to be hung in a rhomboid position, so that they do not not rest on the comforting horizon of a linear base, but rather on a corner that makes the piece look unstable, but which paradoxically coexists with a regular, reassuring linearity of composition. Thus, the work is twofold: its discursive interior and its exterior, i.e. its relationship with its setting, the way in which it is installed, which completely alters its meaning and the nexus between the work and the viewer.

Carlos Martín

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Heimo Zobernig
Mauthen 1958

Heimo Zobernig is one of the most outstanding Austrian artists of the second half of the 20th century. He trained in Vienna at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste from 1977 to 1980 and at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst at the University of Applied Arts from 1980 to 1983. In the same way as other artists of his generation, Zobernig responded to the sculpture and painting of the Neue Wilde [New Wild Ones], with restrained media and objectivity and an abstraction that revisited the avant-garde abstract, minimalism and conceptual art movements, along with contemporary architecture, design and theatre. His paintings, sculptures, videos, performances and installations are produced from a calculated distance and with a deadpan irony regarding the definition and context of art; regarding exhibiting, which integrates visual mechanisms and constructive elements into his work as a staged artistic act that is interwoven with the local and discursive context; and regarding the very role of the artist and of the viewer. The distinctive traits of his work are the scraping away of any glimmer of meaning; the hybrid nature of his objects, which combine self-referentiality and sculptural autonomy with functionality and the associated social dimension; and the relationship between concept and artefact or between sign and text.

After his early shows at the Werkstätten-und Kulturhaus and at the Peter Pakesch Gallery in Vienna, he broke onto the international scene with his participation in events such as Documenta 9 and 10 (Kassel, Germany, 1992 and 1997) and with many solo shows at venues including the Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg, Austria, 1993); the Kunsthaus Graz (Graz, Austria, 1993); the Bonner Kunstverein (Bonn, Germany, 1998); the Museum Moderner Kunst (Vienna, 2002-2003); the Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, Switzerland, 2002-2003); the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf, Germany, 2002-2003); the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna, 2008-2009); the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2012-2013); the Kunsthaus Graz (Graz, Austria, 2012- 2013); and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, United States, 2017).

Roberto Díaz

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.