| K.U.SCH.
(renate Krätschmer Und jörg SCHwarzenberger) "Sowohl als auch, aber weder noch" - "Both and Neither" Installation with performance for the opening |
|||||||||
| 25 April to 25 May 2002 | |||||||||
|
Torso 1999 View of the Exhibition Biography |
||||||||
| Individual modus vivendi Renate Krätschmer and Jörg Schwarzenberger, who have been working together for some time under the joint name K.U.SCH, are among those individualists and outsiders in the Austrian art scene, who develop their border-crossing works and actions in close conjunction with fundamental issues of architecture, environment and life. Laconic, ironic objects (some of them with a clear affinity to Dadaist thinking) and individually conceived, custom-made furniture form the core of their works. Closely linked to the questions of the meaning of life and everyday practice, these represent a permanent, relativizing attempt at an artistic clarification of terms and the visualizing of the complex connections of our life today. "We see our artistic work as an interdisciplinary balancing act with a more or less clearly pronounced tendency toward a total art work, a gesamtkunstwerk. Although our inclinations change, we always keep the larger context in mind. A balancing act involves oscillating between opposites and linking them, clarifying and confounding them, an irritation. The oscillation between a quasi sacral seriousness and a comedic jocularity, between construction and deconstruction, between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, between the auratic and the articulated, factuality and sensuousness, distance and nearness, fullness and emptiness, nothing and something. It is also part of the complexity of this interdisciplinary balancing act that the works topicalize their own ambivalent mediality as well. In the sense of Marshall McLuhan's definition: `The medium is the message.' This is the context for an exploration of themes such as: the wheel, the frame, the pillar, genius, naturalness and artificiality, the second and third skin, the void and negation, the projection surface, the gesture of the line, the sign, signals and symbolism (particularly in conjunction with the interpretation of the trivial world of things). The occasional proximity to Land Art, for instance, Concept Art, Minimal Art, Op Art, Pop Art, Fluxus, Arte Povera or even to individual mythologies has had very specific dimensions and meanings in the respective personal, artistic development of the artist couple. Yet the archaic reductionism and geometric abstraction of the first hour still hovers above it all." (K.U.SCH.) The Neue Galerie has been in contact with the artists for decades. K.U.SCH. is included in the collection of the Linz museum with "Pythagoräischen Meditationstisch mit vier Hockern" (1983) ["Pythagorean Meditation Table with Four Stools"]. For the opening on 25 April 2002 at 7:00 p.m., there will be an installation and a performance in the form of a catwalk theater. |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||