Reflections on Schönberg in contemporary art
until 30 August 2013
The exhibition “art is: new art” takes a completely new approach to the oeuvre of Arnold Schönberg; for the first time, it displays the interest in him in the various media of contemporary art, with all exhibits directly relating to him. In addition, the work of artists such as Rodney Graham and Marina Rosenfeld particularly distinguishes their involvement with music.
Stephen Prina (USA), an artist/musician who will also be giving a concert, seeks confrontation on the graphic level by taking the circle as a recurrent motif in Schönberg’s notations, while Florian Pumhösl (Austria) uses abstract images to investigate the spatial representations with their Zionistic ideas in the stage design sketches for the spoken drama The Biblical Way. Conceptual artist Hong-Kai Wang (Taiwan) poses questions on the transformation of musical form due to emigration and trans-local living conditions; she worked on a video with 12 international composers living in Vienna, all of whom interpret their selected statements about their situations in compositions using Sprechgesang.
By contrast, Pawel Ksiazek, a Polish artist living in Krakow, focuses in his paintings on Schönberg’s hands in historic photographs, interpreting them visually as the expression of a highly-charged energy space.
Many of the contemporary works are accompanied by the Schönberg originals which served as inspiration, impressively demonstrating the enormous pervasion of themes from Schönberg’s work and, above all, the involvement with his persona in contemporary fine art.
The artists: Rodney Graham (Canada), Pawel Ksiazek (Poland), Marcel Odenbach (Germany), Silke Otto-Knapp (Germany), Mathias Poledna (Austria), Stephen Prina (USA), Florian Pumhösl (Austria), Marina Rosenfeld (USA), Simon Starling (GB), Hong-Kai Wang (Taiwan)
Curators: Edek Bartz, Christian Meyer
Exhibition design and architecture: Walter Kräutler, Florian Pumhösl
