October 27–December 31, 2017
Since the 1980s, Vienna-based artist Heimo Zobernig (b 1958, Mauthen, Austria) has been working in sculpture, painting, installation, architecture, design, performance, and video. He has built a rigorous practice that continually pushes back against the tropes of Modernism and seeks to reorient the role of the artist, the institution, the audience, and the artwork itself. His work interrogates traditions in art history, driven by a curiosity for material and gesture, ultimately questioning the institutional mechanisms that support the exhibition of artwork. Zobernig uses the museum and its architecture as a stage; he allows a viewer to confront the constructed, at times theatrical, experience of visiting an art exhibition. Methods of display are exaggerated and upended, architecture and its purpose is flipped and rearranged. He seamlessly moves between installation and intervention, blurring the line between what constitutes a wall versus a stage, a painting versus a sculpture and in doing so, what constitutes an artwork.
Heimo Zobernig: chess painting is curated by Yuri Stone, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center with Diana Baldon, independent curator. chess painting is an extension of a project initiated at the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, in 2016.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene Demoulas & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Jane & Neil Pappalardo, Cynthia & John Reed, and Terry & Rick Stone. Additional funding for Heimo Zobernig: chess painting was generously provided by Petzel Gallery and Modica Carr Art Advisory. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the MIT School of Architecture + Planning, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
