Katharina Grosse: ‘Who, I? Whom, you?’
June 6–October 12, 2014
Opening: June 5, 7pm
Karl Neubacher: Media Artist, 1926–1978
June 18–October 12, 2014
Opening: June 17, 7pm
Kunsthaus Graz Lendkai 1
8020 Graz
Austria
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–5pm
T +43 316/8017 9200
kunsthausgraz [at] museum-joanneum.at
www.museum-joanneum.at/kunsthaus
Katharina Grosse. ‘Who, I? Whom, you?’
Everything flows: painter Katharina Grosse grows floors into pictures, blurs paint over canvas landscapes, while spaces and functional objects are given sculptural clothing. Minimal shifts in perspective transform large into small. An analytical view of detail flows into metaphysical understanding of the whole. The public perceives the picture as an independent cognitive event that dynamises the colour space. Capturing it in a brutal, direct, evolutionary and physical way. Like life itself.
Grosse originally comes from painting and sees herself as a painter. For more than 20 years, her three-dimensional work has expanded as powerful incursions of colour into physically experienced space. In doing so she creates situations that make colour physically palpable. In her works, boundaries exist in order to be found, pervaded and diffused. At the Kunsthaus Graz, Grosse addresses the meaning of reduced allusion and the theatrical side of colour by developing a colour space into a stage space, raising questions about the experiential nature of matter and existence and also about the aesthetic control of light and linearity.
Born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau, since the 1990s Katharina Grosse has been one of the most internationally renowned artists of her generation. Alongside numerous international exhibition projects both in museum and public space, on May 21 she was awarded the Oskar-Schlemmer-Prize, the Grand State Prize of Baden-Württemberg 2014.
Curated by Katrin Bucher Trantow
Kunsthaus Graz, Space01
Karl Neubacher. Media Artist, 1926–1978
Karl Neubacher is one of the pioneers of avant-garde and conceptual art in Graz, Austria, along with Richard Kriesche and Peter Gerwin Hoffman. These 1960s and 1970s protagonists are showing themselves to be more and more relevant not only within Austria, but far beyond the narrow confines of provincialism.
Neubacher, who in 1969 joined the producers’ group pool, was mostly active as a graphic designer. As such he completed significant works for the avant-garde festival steirischer herbst, the art magazine pfirsich, the shoe company HUMANIC and others. His posters, which were always based on artistic concepts, were internationally renowned and awarded (e.g. Graphic Design Excellence Award, icograda). The overall picture of applied arts and austere forms of fine arts created a unique tension that defined Neubacher’s artistic practice.
Neubacher’s main medium was photography, but another (and no less important) medium was his own body, which he used in performances and documented with photography and film: he himself turned into a ‘public art figure.’ The short films created in the 1970s turned Neubacher into one of the hitherto undiscovered avant-garde film-makers. They are an expression of the intense struggle for the validity of artistic expression waged between avant-garde radicalism and realism.
Curated by Günther Holler-Schuster
Kunsthaus Graz, Space02
