Individual Stories: Collecting as Portrait and Methodology
26 June–11 October 2015
Opening: 25 June, 7pm
Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Vienna
Austria
Hours: Friday–Wednesday 10am–7pm,
Thursday 10am–9pm
www.kunsthallewien.at
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Artists are collectors, attracted to unusual material forms and immaterial phenomena. Benjamin Buchloh once credited Marcel Duchamp as the initial “artist-as-collector” referring to his ready-mades. Through the collection and conservation of objects, Duchamp was concerned with the relation between the material source and artistic work.
The exhibition Individual Stories at Kunsthalle Wien presents a selection of 20 contemporary artists who agreed to show the personal items they have collected, recorded or documented, or the artworks which have evolved from the process of collecting.
The act of collecting as a personalized and individual engagement is a means to learn more about the persona and, in the specific case of an artist’s collection, an approach toward their artistic practice. Addressing different formal, aesthetic and conceptual concerns, the collections vary and lead a path to understanding the respective artists’ works. While some collections exist as independent from artistic practice, others constitute an artistic methodology or could be regarded as works of art themselves. The items shown at Kunsthalle Wien each have a personal relation to their collector. Thus, the exhibition aims at simultaneously reading collections as portraits of the artists and their fields of interests. It offers a new view on contemporary artistic practice through the act and method of collecting.
On occasions driven by curiosity, at other times by systematic search for something, the various collections presented in the exhibition offer dramatically different approaches to the broad field of collecting as such. The emphasis on individual portraits allows for alternative access to what can be a very intimate part of artistic work, thus facilitating fresh perspective on the artists’ oeuvre.
Kunsthalle Wien will publish an accompanying publication with photographs by Marie Angeletti, who will document the collections in an intimate and personal fashion, together with texts written by each of the artists outlining why she or he began to collect (published by Sternberg Press).
Artists: Saâdane Afif, Jacques André, Marie Angeletti, Thomas Bayrle, Barbara Bloom, Herbert Brandl, Andrea Büttner, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Camille Henrot, Michaela Maria Langenstein, Pierre Leguillon, Hanne Lippard, Maurizio Nannucci, G.T. Pellizzi, Max Renkel, Michael Riedel, Hubert Scheibl, Yann Sérandour, John Stezaker, Johannes Wohnseifer
Curators: Luca Lo Pinto, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Anne-Claire Schmitz
Press
Katharina Murschetz: T +43 (0) 1 5 21 89 1221 / katharina.murschetz [at] kunsthallewien.at
Stefanie Obermeir: T +43 (0) 1 5 21 89 1224 / presse [at] kunsthallewien.at
