Conceptual Art in Austria
Robert Fleck
Video
The video is available in German
The history of Conceptual Art began in the United States in 1955and marked an enormous evolution of what art can be and how it works. Its representatives emphasized the immaterial qualities as well as the idea behind art, thus presenting the market and museums with new challenges. Art was no longer understood primarily as an object and a commodity. A major challenge was therefore also the marketing and communication of conceptual art, a task that initially only a few representatives of the art system in Europe took on.
Of great importance in this context is the (present-day) Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna, which was an early advocate of conceptual approaches. Founded by Monsignor Otto Mauer in the 1950s and later continued by Oswald Oberhuber and Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, the gallery advanced to become an important place of interdisciplinary discourse. Today, the HALLE FÜR KUNST hosts art historian and curator Robert Fleck. Fleck will provide exciting insights into the developments of conceptual art in Austria and will also talk about the significance of the gallery.
Artists
Participating artists
Robert Fleck
is an Austrian art historian and curator. Fleck is currently professor of art and the public sphere at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and director of the Akademie-Galerie. After studying in Vienna and Innsbruck, he studied at the Sorbonne and the Collége de France in Paris with Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault, among others, and earned his doctorate in Innsbruck. Fleck has served as director of the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg and the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Bonn. He was Austrian Federal Curator of Fine Arts and co-curator of the 2nd European Biennial of Contemporary Art Manifesta in Luxembourg. Recent publications: Heinz Mack. A 21st Century Artist (co-authored with Antonia Lehmann-Tolkmitt, 2019), Yves Klein et l’Allemagne (2018) Pierre Soulages (co-authored with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2017), and Das Atelier im 21. Jahrhundert (2017).
More contributions
Eva Ursprung
The Art of Surfacing
Slide show
With the exhibition The Art of Surfacing, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark presents the multifaceted work of Austrian artist, musician, and curator Eva Ursprung, who was awarded the Honorary Prize of the Province of Styria in 2024. Her cross-media, feminist, and socially critical approaches revolve around the element of water as a metaphor for change and political and ecological processes.
Slide show Eva Ursprung Susanne Wenger
Àdùnní Olórìṣà
Slide show
Susanne Wenger gilt als eine zentrale Künstlerin Österreichs nach 1945 und als frühe Wegbereiterin des Surrealismus. Ihr Œuvre, das Skulpturen, Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Drucke und Batiken umfasst, überschreitet ästhetische Kategorien und verbindet Kunst, Spiritualität und Mythos.
Slide Show Susanne Wenger Exhibition Tour
Diego Bianchi: Errores Irreales
Video
Diego Bianchi’s immersive sculptural installations reinterpret the concepts of sculpture and of the torso, taking seriously the sensitivity and distress of the human body as subjected to manifold pressures, and expanding and updating its forms of expression.
Exhibition Tour Diego Bianchi Exhibition Tour
Celina Eceiza: Ofrenda
Video
A metabolic force governs the growth of Celina Eceiza’s work, which involves textile collages, sculptures, paintings and drawings — both tiny and colossal in scale — as laborious as they are elementary. The artist combines handcrafted textile techniques and processes such as patchwork, found object collages and, more recently, chalk pastels, which give her images a new sense of fluidity.
Ausstellungsrundgang Celina Eceiza Annemarie Arzberger
dreamed awake
Slide show
For HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark the artist has developed her first own performative presentation, with a setting for her puppets with three scenes set in an imaginary spaceship, an exhibition, and the spaces that the scenes depict: the Schlouflaboar, the Houloudecks, and the Space Grotto Disco. The piece is a combination of physical theater and puppetry, performed by the artist together with her sister Katharina Arzberger and accompanied by musical interludes arranged by Manuel Obriejtan.
Slide Show Annemarie Arzberger Diego Bianchi
Errores Irreales
Slide show
Diego Bianchi (*1969 Buenos Aires, lives in Buenos Aires) is considered one of Argentina’s leading artists and has, in particular, updated the concept of sculpture. For his installative and performative exhibition Errores Irreales at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Bianchi has assembled a selection of his sculptures that play with the concept of the body.
Slide show Diego Bianchi Diego Bianchi
Errores Irreales
Performance
Slide show
Errores Irreales is only truly activated by the performance staged by Diego Bianchi himself in order to complete his theatrical installation, which takes physicality and its limits to a new level.
Diego Bianchi, Performance Celina Eceiza
Ofrenda
Slide show
Ofrenda [Offering] presents a way of inhabiting a space as if the architecture were a body, breathing erratically, changing states as you pass from one room to the next. The rigidity of the building collapses as the walls are draped in thousands of metres of fabric joined together through the collective and timeless action of sewing, until they form a single smooth surface, sensitive to the slightest change.
Slide show Celina Eceiza