HEIMO ZOBERNIG, wood painting

The Vienna-based artist Heimo Zobernig (b. 1958, Mauthen, Austria) has achieved wide recognition for his works in sculpture, painting, video and performance. They are defined by a calculated balance, calling into question form and function, abstraction and figuration, presentation and staging, play and critique. An important representative of the artists associated with “Kontext-Kunst” (Context Art) in the German-speaking art scene of the 1990s, Zobernig often establishes a close dialogue with the architecture and history of a specific site. At the same time his works “queer” accepted artistic canons, art-institutional hierarchies and the mechanisms behind the presentation, communication and understanding of art.

For his solo show wood painting at Malmö Konsthall, a series of new sculptures reflects on the iconic architecture of the space, unpacking its function as a neutral container for art within a dialectic of figure and ground. Zobernig problematises the question of what an artwork is by incorporating the temporary partition walls built to display Joan Jonas’s works in the preceding exhibition, Light Time Tales. By leaving these former support structures unaltered and in their original positions, Zobernig enables them to gain significance as sculptural works that bear an ambivalent resemblance to plinths and stage props. On a subtler level, he initiates a dialogue with the work and ideas of the legendary Swedish theatre and film director Ingmar Bergman, who in the 1950s directed the Malmö City Theatre located across the road from Malmö Konsthall.

Interspersed among these works are standard, modular stage podiums whose tops are recovered by a black and white chequered fabric. They look warm and soft to the touch, inviting viewers to sit on them and spend more time in the climate-controlled exhibition space, thus delicately redirecting their attention to the building – a work of architecture as famous as its exhibition programme. Geometric nets and chequered boards have been a recurring motif in Zobernig’s works, in particular in the series ‘sculpture colours’ and ‘grid paintings’ of the late 1980s. The grid was adopted as a formalist vocabulary by many modernist artists, from Piet Mondrian and Max Bill to Sol LeWitt. Zobernig deploys it as a way to thwart the viewer’s thirst for visual pleasure, and to suggest a freer understanding of art as an open visual code.

While Zobernig’s sculptures often respond to the legacy of the discourse and themes of abstract and Minimalist art, they also engage closely with an expanded notion of publishing as a way to explore the linguistic aspects of art. The newly commissioned publication Books & Posters will appear in the course of the exhibition. A hybrid between catalogue and artist’s book, it gives a comprehensive overview of all the artist’s books, printed-matter editions, monographs, catalogues and posters designed and published by Zobernig since 1980.

Curator: Diana Baldon