Hans Schabus: The Long Road from Tall Trees to Tall Houses

For nearly two decades of practice, Austrian sculptor Hans Schabus has been making artworks and installations that self-reflectively and curiously play with his experiences of the cosmos. His own surroundings are often the key reference with which he builds ideas into physical manifestation. He has dug massive holes in his studio, burrowed under museums, sailed through sewage systems, and in 2005, transformed the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale into a mammoth, labyrinthine mountain.

This new exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein itself emerges from the artist’s own reflective and poetic excursion through space and time. Last summer, Hans Schabus journeyed across the United States on his bicycle. Each day, at high noon, he stopped to document his whereabouts. Each evening he wrote a postcard, often attaching fragments or notes from his daily experiences. In a quasi-journalistic manner, he tracked his progress from one end of the country to the other. This daily ritual and the journey itself inform the sculptural installation in the main gallery of the Salzburger Kunstverein, which involves an intervention in the architecture itself.

Born in Watschig, Austria in 1970, Hans Schabus lives and works in Vienna.

This exhibition tours to Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany in 2017. An artist book accompanies the exhibition. This project was made possible through the generous support of Phileas.

Running concurrently to Hans Schabus’ show is the exhibition Tomograma by Ella Littwitz.

Ella Littwitz’s artwork addresses territorialization and the construction of historical and psychological frontiers, and the often unstable rules that create these divisions. In the Kabinett space of the Salzburger Kunstverein, the artist presents an installation inspired, in part, by nineteen years of footballs caught in a minefield in a divided Jerusalem. Ella Littwitz, born 1982 in Israel, lives and works in Berlin, Ghent, and Israel.

We also announce the commencement of a year-long exhibition in progress and artist residency by German painter, Carsten Fock. Entitled Salzburg, and running the entire length of the corridor of the Ringgalerie of the Salzburger Kunstverein, the exhibition will be developed stage by stage by the artist throughout the year, until its conclusion in December. Carsten Fock lives and works in Munich and Berlin.

All exhibitions curated by Séamus Kealy, Director, Salzburger Kunstverein.