Exhibitions at Secession
2 December 2011–5 February 2012
Press Conference:
Thurs December 1, 2011, 10 A.M.
Exhibition Opening:
Thurs December 1, 2011, 7 P.M.
secession
Friedrichstraße 12
A-1010 Wien
T +43-1-587 53 07-11
F +43-1-587 53 07-34
office [at] secession.at
Exhibitions for Secession
The collages, films, and architectural mises-en-scène of the Croatian artist David Maljkovic form part of the current critical engagement with modernism. Maljkovic turns his attention to sculptural and architectonic symbols that, against the backdrop of Yugoslav socialism, signified the dawn of a new era: Vojin Bakic’s monument to the victims of World War II; the Italian pavilion at the Zagreb trade fairground; the works of EXAT 51, a group of experimental architects and artists who championed abstraction and the synthesis of art and social context in the early 1950s. Maljkovic renegotiates the significance of his native country’s historic, cultural, and theoretical heritage by relating it to the present and the possibilities of the future. In his collages, he often combines historic views of powerfully symbolic monuments with contemporary photographs; the settings of his films, by contrast, function as projection screens for a younger generation’s ideas about progress, exuding an atmosphere of wasted potential and resigned optimism. Maljkovic’s works probe the dialectic between innovations that seem to have been forgotten, the ruinous present state of projects once created amid great euphoria, and the present as an era of transitions and new beginnings.
David Maljkovic, b. Rijeka (HR) 1973, lives and works in Zagreb (HR).
Attila Csörgõ
The Hungarian artist Attila Csörgõ’s photographic, sculptural, and graphical works use humor and irony to introduce the beholder to questions from the natural sciences—with results that are often unexpected and, more importantly, amusing. Csörgõ builds experimental arrangements to explore phenomena from kinetics, optics, or geometry. The artist’s oeuvre thus probes questions of human perception and ideas about the construction of the world. By using photography, for instance, to capture the light emitted by motion sequences or energetic processes, Csörgõ enables us to see phenomena that are imperceptible under ordinary conditions, rendering us keenly aware of what we take for granted. The artist builds his apparatuses out of everyday objects and materials. For the sculpture Magnet Spring (1991), for instance, Csörgõ relied on the magic of magnetism. Twelve glass panes were held upright by nothing but the force of repulsion between numerous magnets in the shape of ice hockey pucks that seemed to float. For Moebius Space (2006), the artist developed a mechanism for a tracking shot that enabled him to create a photographic Moebius strip—a loop in which the two ends of a film are still an exact match after a rotation of 180°. At the Secession, Attila Csörgõ will present a new work.
Friday, December 2, 2011, 5:00 p.m.: exhibition discussion with Attila Csörgõ and Christian Höller
An event organized by Friends of the Secession
Attila Csörgõ, b. Budapest (HU) 1965, lives and works in Budapest (HU).
Lecia Dole-Recio
At the center of Lecia Dole-Recio’s paintings stands the materiality of the support medium, which she subjects to both surface and interventive manipulation. Instead of relying solely on prefabricated canvases for her works, Dole-Recio creates her own surfaces: using glue, she collages paper, various kinds of cardboard, and parchment to produce a substratum on which she then layers color, and after this painterly treatment she deconstructs the result by cutting it to pieces. The saturation and composition of the colors and the constructivist appeal of the brushwork contribute as much to the quality of her work as the depth of the positive and negative spaces she uncovers with the knife. The artist transforms the support media of her paintings into figuratively as well as literally multilayered constructions that defy unambiguous categorization. They forcefully suggest architecture, urban ensembles seen in a bird’s eye view, mapping. But the arrangements of colors, materials, and spaces also bring music to mind, models for the orchestration of musical experiments whose rhythmic composition is inspired by the depths of painting. For her exhibition in the Secession’s Grafisches Kabinett, Lecia Dole-Recio is developing a new series of works.
Lecia Dole-Recio, b. San Francisco (US) 1971, lives and works in Los Angeles (US).
Opening Hours:
Tuesday–Sunday 10.00 a.m.–6.00 p.m.
Saturday, December 24: 10.00 a.m. – 4.00 p.m.
Sunday, December 24: closed
Sunday, Jänner 1, 2012: 12.00 a.m. – 6.00 p.m.
Guided Tours: Saturdays at 3.00 p.m. and Sundays at 11.00 a.m. and by appointment
(maximum 25 persons)
Permanent Exhibition: Beethovenfries Von Gustav Klimt
