Bruno Gironcoli: Prototypes for a New Species

The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting a selection of monumental sculptures from the late work of the artist Bruno Gironcoli (1936–2010) in a thought-provoking exhibition. The Austrian artist is considered to be one of the most important sculptors of his generation. Beginning in the early 1960s, he drew on his never-ending inventive voracity to create a highly idiosyncratic and remarkable oeuvre rendered in a very personal and individual visual language. In groups of ever-new works, he continually succeeded in finding an unmistakable and yet surprising voice. Wire sculptures gave way to hollow-body forms, polyester objects, and disconcerting environments. Gironcoli’s work always focused on the individual and his abysses. The artist shared his existential questions and politically motivated avant-garde thought with fellow artists of the Viennese scene. His aesthetics of exorbitance and opulence constantly gave rise to excrescences and curlicues and have inspired numerous younger artists, including former students such as Franz West, Hans Schabus, or Ugo Rondinone.

In 1977, Gironcoli took over direction of the sculpture school of the Akademie der bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Vienna. For the first time, he began to create sculptures that filled or frequently even defied space, made possible by the generous studio situation. As if derived from a theater of the absurd or a surreal dream world, the gigantic objects seem to be Prototypes for a new species, enveloped in shining, seductive surfaces of gold, silver, and copper. The Schirn is presenting a total of six of these sculptures—both inside and outside in the rotunda.

Dr. Philipp Demandt, the Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt: “As one of the first exhibitions in the New Year, the Schirn is presenting the late work of the exceptional Austrian artist Bruno Gironcoli. His Prototypes, these machine-like entities, do truly seem very alive, impress with their monumentality, and at once look as though they could be either archaic finds or utopian designs. Although Gironcoli influenced entire generations of artists with his idiosyncratic, singular oeuvre, exhibited at the Biennials in São Paulo and Venice, and his work was presented in many large exhibitions, he is, unfortunately, still largely unknown and much too little appreciated in Germany.”

The Prototypes provide a fluid connection between recognizable and ornamental forms that proliferate in a vegetal manner. Mechanistic, machine-like elements are combined with eye-catching symbols and provocative flourishes. These are physical artworks that play with the viewer’s perception in many respects. With their surfaces in gold, silver, or bronze, the sculptures look as if they had been cast, even though only a few of them actually exist as aluminum castings. The sculptural forms instead consist of diverse metals such as iron, aluminum, tin, or brass. They are often rods, pipes, and sheet metal that were worked into the desired form, and/or wood and iron structures that were constructed with the help of his assistants. The individual, modular parts were moved again and again and frequently re-assembled to create new units, new sculptures.

The clear, abstract structure of the Prototypes is disrupted again and again by representational details such as small horns, infants, wine barrels, key-like objects, spheres, and amorphous shapes, which erupt and grow. The sculptures captivate with an excessiveness that is clear not only in their monumental dimensions, but also in their complexity—forms that are aesthetically appealing and multilayered in meaning. They bring together the mechanistic and organic, the psychological and the technical.

The curator of the exhibition, Dr. Martina Weinhart, says about Bruno Gironcoli: “In approaching the universe of Bruno Gironcoli, the term hybrid perhaps fits best. It applies to the static quality that keeps these massive and monumental sculptures in motion. It also applies to the forever-unfinished quality of the works, which will be reassembled time and again, and grow together to form new units, new sculptures. The character of the Prototypes is the in-between. They are representational and abstract, alien and familiar at the same time. They are avant-garde and somehow also folkloristic, monumental in a loudmouthed way, and sensitively conceived. They are a resolutely shaped realm between things, fashions, and eras.”

The exhibition Bruno Gironcoli. Prototypes for a New Species is supported by the Schirn Freunde e.V. With additional support by the STRABAG Kunstforum.

A bilingual catalog with a foreword by Philipp Demandt, an essay by the curator Martina Weinhart as well as a comprehensive biography of Bruno Gironcoli has been published.

Director: Dr. Philipp Demandt
Curators: Dr. Martina Weinhart
Press contact: Pamela Rohde (Head of Press/Public Relations):
presse [​at​] schirn.de / T (+49 69) 29 98 82 148

Press material: www.schirn.de/en (texts, images, and films for download under PRESS)