Florian Pumhösl

Opening on Friday, 30 November 2007, 7-9 p.m.

In his second solo exhibition at Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Florian Pumhösl (*1971, lives in Vienna) is showing new glass paintings and his latest 16mm film, “OA 1979-3-5-036”. “OA 1979-3-5-036” is the conversion of a Japanese book by Take Hiratsugi from the late 17th century into a 16mm animated film. The book is called “Gozen Hiinagata” (“Dress Patterns for Noble Ladies”), one volume of a multi-volume pattern catalogue with examples of the earliest Japanese kimono designs. Little is known about Take Hiratsugi, the author of what can be called a popular publication, except that he himself was in the kimono trade. The motifs shown in the book’s woodcuts generally consist only of outlines designed to make it easy for the purchaser to copy the pattern. In Florian Pumhösl’s film these patterns are selected, simplified and rearranged. For this purpose, the book is first turned 90 degrees and then transferred in negative onto a timeline. The cuts in the film stand for turning the book’s pages. The forms shown here result from a process of reduction, in order to ultimately arrive at a typology of fragments of the graphic elements that are depicted in the book in abstracted fashion – originally floral and landscape images, everyday objects and architectural details. “OA 1979-3-5-036” (the title indicates the ordinal number of the book in the British Museum registry) can be regarded as documenting an artistic experiment focusing on selective perception of a form, involving remembering and classifying the forms in a catalogue.

Florian Pumhösl’s image production entails the creation of three-dimensional constellations. In this exhibition, the projection of the animated film is integrated into the hanging of a series of glass paintings, interrupting their arrangement. The paintings bear titles from the printing and publishing industry, such as “Plakat” (Poster), “Seite” (Page), “Aushang” (Notice) or “Tabloid”. The geometric shapes depicted therein are reductions of compositional, structuring elements that are used in modern layout to help interpret a text, in this case mostly taken from pages of text and pamphlets in the typography of the 1920s and 30s Japanese avant-garde. Here, however, the surfaces are devoid of text and the abstract structuring symbols are thus liberated from their decorative/highlighting function. One can picture these images as media whose visual language excludes writing and functionality.

In the picture cycle immediately preceding this one, “Modernologie”, exhibited this summer at documenta 12 in Kassel, Pumhösl identified and depicted a formal vocabulary that expressed an exchange of symbols between the Japanese, Russian and European avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century. He now continues this undertaking in the present exhibition, with the focus this time not on the art historical context, but rather on calling into question to what extent it is possible to act within a space defined by the artist himself – a space that emerges from the hierarchy between his own authorship and its research sources, between the historical references or concrete borrowings that are deemed useful and what the artist himself can depict. In addition to establishing form and its debt to history, the ideas of abstraction as language, and memory as a feature of the modern space, also play a role here.

Florian Pumhösl