An exhibition in the context of the Austrian Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2006
With Hermann Nitsch, Franz West, Günter Brus, Arnulf Rainer, Erwin Wurm, Adolf Frohner, Elke Krystufek, Manfredu Schu, Oswald Oberhuber, Marco Lulic, Karin Frank, Ellen Semen, Eva Schlegel, Aglaia Konrad, Thomas Stimm, Casaluce-Geiger, Michaela Moscouw, G.R.A.M.
Contemporary art from Austria is often on the fringes and in opposition to so-called high society. This has a long tradition in Austria, not only among representatives of the visual arts, but also in theater and literature, where art and provocation are closely linked. Individuals such as Elfriede Jelinek or Thomas Bernhard, for example, stand for a clear distance between artists and politics, something that can hardly be found so seriously elsewhere. The provocative lies in the essence of Austrian art.
The focus of the exhibition is on people.
With predominantly figurative depictions that lament and accuse, cover up and reveal, flirt and look cheeky, the range of human life from birth to death is shown, without neglecting themes such as love, sex, health and illness, mendacious alibi truths and wrongly distributed justice.
A metaphor for the exhibition is a full coffee cup and saucer, overflowing at the top. This image is used for the invitation, the poster and the advertising. The theme of Austria is represented on the advertising poster by a baroque cup and saucer, an image of flow and abundance. The upper rim of a fully filled coffee cup is subject to constant shaking, with sometimes cream, sometimes coffee, sometimes a mixture of coffee and cream spilling over the upper rim of the cup and dripping down the outside of the cup. An intermezzo of polarizing liquids, black coffee and white cream, which linger sedately inside the cup in a baroque and supersaturated state, but which enter into an existential crisis as soon as they are washed up to the upper rim and lose themselves dripping into the saucer outside the domestic broth.
Wunderkammer Österreich, Austria im Rosennetz (Austria in the Rose Net) is what Harald Szeemann, perhaps the most important curator in the world, called his exhibition, which was first shown at the MAK, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, in 1996, then at the Kunsthaus Zürich and subsequently at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1998. As an authentic Swiss Swiss, he captured the creativity of a country through a mix of history, science, folklore and art development like no other exhibition organizer ever before.
Szeemann said: "For me, there are only three countries in Europe that can be treated as 'visionary': Switzerland, Austria and Belgium."
And the editor of the catalog at the time, Peter Noever, Director of the MAK in Vienna and curator of the current "Wiener Werkstätte" exhibition at the Bozar in Brussels, posed the question in his foreword: "Can we really succeed in weaving a network of roses that is fine and at the same time wide-meshed enough so that they can all be contained and preserved in it?"
"Österreichische Kunst am oberen Tassenrand" does not claim to be an overview of Austrian art with a slightly ironic scent, but rather aims to pick up on the 'artistic temperament' that moves freely and does not tolerate narrowness.
Francis Feidler
Curator of the exhibition and director of ikob
02.04.06 - 18.06.06
IKOB, Eupen
IKOB - International Art Center East Belgium
In den Loten 3
B-4700 Eupen
Belgium
fon ++32-(0)87-560 110
info@ikob.be