Opening on monday, 23rd of May 2016, 7Pm
At the opening a sound performance will be held in cooperation with Franz Jochum /University of music Graz.
Duration until 18th of June 2016.
This exhibition is only indirectly related to Ingrid Bergmann’s movie Gritos y Susurros. The filmmaker’s cinematic memento mori is a highly condensed and intensely poetical aesthetic vision and leads to areas residing between dreams and banal reality. Here, the inner landscape of the soul is turned inside-out in almost surrealistic fashion.
The Cuban artist Victor Piverno, who lives in Havana, and the Munich painter Anton Petz implement qualities of the multidisciplinary in their collaborative work. Piverno develops his simple, curved tube sculptures from automatic drawings that are spontaneously created in the sense of an écriture automatique. As if they had only just suddenly appeared, his tube-like structures lie dormant or writhe in space. They seem unfinished and committed to a function, but at the same time are also abstract, puzzling and quite difficult to define. Rather than being extensions of Petz’s starkly colourful paintings, they appear more as part of a spatial concept which integrates the viewing public into an ambient whole. Some of Petz’s pictures – those which are focused on crowds or groups gathering in public space – receive an absolutely disturbing counterpart in the informal sculptures.
Much to everyone’s surprise, the three-dimensional lines implemented in space can also be transposed to the field of acoustics. Ultimately, they are the cries which the artist lets out into the world in his attempt to break down the visual whispers of art. In this exhibition, they are music instruments which provide, as it were, the acoustic level to the scenarios in Petz’s suddenly grimly glowing paintings. For Piverno, art either represents commitment or consternation. Various traditions, such as those of socialist realism or surrealism, come together to create a dense atmosphere of images, objects and sounds that merge into a momentary inseparable whole at the exhibition. The intense colour effect of the images and the resounding abstract objects also add a mental dimension to the material surface as well as to the change from two dimensionality to three dimensionality, one which appeals to inner states and conditions.
The relationship which Petz and Piverno have established between their works for this exhibition is such that their union presents a totally new thematic dimension.
Günther Holler-Schuster
