SPARK ART FAIR VIENNA
MARX HALLE
BESUCHER*INNEN
VERNISSAGE: Do. 24.Juni 2021 | 17 – 20 Uhr
Messetage 25.–27. Juni 2021
Öffnungszeiten 11–19 Uhr
Karl Farkas Gasse 19, 1030 Wien
University of Applied Arts Vienna
MARTINA MENEGON
When you are close to me I shiver 2020 live simulation various © Martina Menegon
“when you are close to me I shiver” is an algorithmically controlled live simulation, a real-time generated virtual reality that takes place in a version of the future in which humans, out of desperation, gather in masses on the last remaining piece of land. Inspired by the walrus scene in the documentary “Our Planet” narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Silverback Films, the project proposes an intense scenario encompassing our environmental and personal crises. It reflects on how we identify and connect ourselves in different realities while addressing the human condition in a world in ecological and therefore social crisis. On the tablets, virtual cameras scan the environment from various point of views, like surveillance drones. On the main screen, a similar camera randomly targets and focuses on different situations while a familiar voice-over narrates the tragic story. The grotesque low-poly clones of the artist’s 3D scanned body (per)form the population of the island. Through these perceivable avatars, the artist creates a new identity that arises out of plurality, proprioceptively renegotiating the fragility of both the physical and the virtual self and its realities. The dystopian imagery of “when you are close to me I shiver” reveals a seemingly surreal scene that is all too real after all.
Georg Kargl Fine Arts
Jakob Lena Knebl
Jakob Lena Knebl (*1970, Baden, near Vienna) studied fashion at the University of Applied Arts Vienna with Raf Simons and textual sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Heimo Zobernig. In her practice she combines the language of fashion with art historical argumentation. Her recent works deal with compositions of other artists and play with objects of contemporary European culture.
Georg Kargl Fine Art
http://www.georgkargl.com/en
EXIL VIENNA
Nschotschi Haslinger
Education 2003-2010 Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig, class Prof. Walter Dahn Selected exhibitions 2020 Raupe. Performance with Shì-Kollectiv. Interspecies evening, Klosterruine, Berlin Among Them, Kirchgasse, Steckborn, CH Cherchez la femme II, Galerie Susanne Neuerburg, Hennef Museé sentimental de l’ours de Berlin, Bärenzwinger, Berlin 2019 Glazed and confused, Fonda, Leipzig Der geheime Dienst, Zerofold, Köln (solo) Sinkhole Projekt, Friedhof Pankow, Berlin Vertikalwinkel, Schaufenster, Berlin Die untere Welt, Overbeck-Gesellschaft in der St. Petrikirche, Lubek (solo) When the sick rule the world, Gr_und, Berlin. Curated by Christina Gigliotti. Hands of doom, Storage Capacité, Berlin 2018 Paradise Circus, Limbo, Berlin (solo) Carput, Hilbertraum, Berlin Das gestohlene Lied, Galerie Genscher, Hamburg (solo) mi chiedo se c’è un posto in questo mondo…, KM, Berlin Apropofola, Kunstverein Kjubh, Cologne (solo) 2017 Body Electric, Galerie Sandra Buergel, Berlin Lübeck sammelt I, Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lubeck 2016 Comedy Club 2, Berlin Project Space Festival, Berlin The Snorring Princess, Kunstgruppe, Cologne Sammlung Simonow, Kunsthalle Bozen, Bolanzo & Adler Düsseldorf, Dusseldorf 2015 Die Zitternde Kammer, Wienowski & Harbord, Berlin Kunstpreis junger Westen 2015, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Recklinghausen Shoes Moon, Galerie Genscher, Hamburg (solo) Die zitternde Kammer präsentiert: We Come as Friends, Sammlung Haus Harig, Hanover Eternal lines, Zerp Galerie, Rotterdam 2013 Ruhe-Störung, Streifzüge durch die Welt der Collage, Marta Herford, Herford Hamburger Bahnhof, Galerie Kai Erdmann, Hamburg
E X I L E
Dürst Britt & Mayhew NL
Jacqueline de Jong
For the first edition of SPARK Art Fair Dürst Britt & Mayhew is proud to present a solo exhibition by Jacqueline de Jong, comprising of paintings from her series ‘Potato Blues’ and gold objects from the series ‘Pommes de Jong’.
Inspiration for both series is Jacqueline de Jong’s delight in the strange sprouted forms that a humble potato can take on. After their harvest they are left to dry for a long period of time, during which they produce sprouts, flowers, and bulges, before finally drying out completely. Only after this long natural process of transformation are they ready to be modified into precious objects or paintings.
The lives of De Jong’s potato works start in the soil of her 16th century house in the Bourbonnais in France, where in 1996 she planted a vegetable garden. It was only in 2003 that she discovered some old potatoes in the cellar of her house. Their sprouts made her think of crazy horses or long cat’s hair and she felt that these potatoes could prove an interesting material to work with. Collector of artists’ jewellery Clo Fleiss asked her to create a piece, which led to the ‘Pommes de Jong’ series in 2008. For this series selected dried out potatoes are dipped into a bath of gold or platinum, which fixates them and preserves them for ‘eternity’ as a sort of ‘sculpture trouvée’.
In August 2016, Jacqueline de Jong and onestar press in Paris published “La Psychogeographie des pommes de terre”: Potato Blues. This artist’s book compiles reproductions of black and white photographs of De Jong’s garden and potatoes in various stages of sprouting. For the publication the photographs were retouched by the artist with a black felt pen. Additionally De Jong enlarged and transferred selected photographs onto canvas and augmented these with oil sticks and nepheline gel. Suddenly animals, landscapes and monsters – part of the artist’s vocabulary since the early 1960s – seem to emerge upon the surface of the paintings. The titles of the works are funny, zany reinterpretations of the names of the different varieties of potatoes.
We would like to thank onestar press in Paris and Eenwerk in Amsterdam for their kind cooperation and the Dutch Embassy in Austria for supporting this presentation.
fair
GALERIE KONZETT
FREDERICK STEINMANN
FREDERICK STEINMANN was born in Switzerland in 1953. At the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the School of Arts and Crafts in Vevey. Two years later, he left Switzerland for good and moved to Rome, where he studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti from 1972 to 1978. At the end of 1978, he moved to Vienna, which he later left for one year to take in the euphoria of New York. In 1995, tired of the limitations imposed by geographical constraints, he returned to Switzerland, where he spent the following six months preparing his trip to Cairo, where he spent the following four years, his work imbued with Eastern mysticism. From Rome to New York and then on to Cairo, his travels have always taken him back to Vienna, where he has been living and working for the past five years. His exiles have had a strange influence on his work. He refines and plays with his materials, working the iron and wooden bases until they are smooth so that it becomes easier to apply the detailed, inevitable reality, which purports to be either cynical, greedy, sensual or simply animal-like, yet always with a poetic element. Frédérick Steinmann has gained the lucidity that comes from travelling.
Galerie Konzett
http://www.artkonzett.com/de/ausstellungen/aktuell/
Max Goelitz Vienna
Niko Abramidis &NE (*1987 in Europe, lives and works in Munich and Berlin, DE) opens up a diverse spectrum dealing with economic structures and visions of the future. Within his drawings, paintings, sculptures and room installations, Niko Abramidis &NEs develops parallel universes in which he creates fictitious corporate identities and appropriates forms of expression from financial economics. This also includes the play with words through signs, symbols and ciphers, via which he transfers his artistic ideas of myth and literary fiction. The artist develops a semiotics of archaic symbols paired with sketchy drawings, which he puts together using the latest technologies. Niko Abramidis &NE studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Julian Rosefeldt and Markus Oehlen and at the Berlin University of the Arts with Byung-Chul Han. He is co-founder of the art space easy!upstream, which he artistically directed from 2015-2018. In 2018, he was awarded the prize ars viva for visual arts, which is awarded annually by the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V. This was followed by group exhibitions in 2019 at the Kunstmuseum Bern and at KAI 10 | Arthena Foundation in Düsseldorf. He also received an artist-in-residency grant on Fogo Island, Canada.
max goelitz
Sabrina Amrani Gallery (Madrid, ES)
ALEXANDRA KARAKSHIAN
Alexandra Karakashian (b. 1988, Johannesburg) is a South African artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her work stems from her personal and family history and reflects on current issues of exile, migration and refugee-statues. Process and materiality is key to her practice. Employing used engine oil and salt as a medium for painting, she engages in ecological discussion, the threatening instability and subtle collapse; and the unethical seizing of rapidly dwindling natural resources, particularly on the resource-rich African continent. Furthermore she investigates notions of mourning – both of an individual and collective nature – and the lamentation of the loss of land and of those who have been ‘unhomed’. Her work is part of private and public collections including the Iziko South African National Gallery in South Africa, the Spier Collection in South Africa, the Darvesh Collection in the UAE, The Royal Portfolio Collection, in South Africa, and the Luciano Benetton Collection in Italy.
Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman
Johannes Wohnseifer
Johannes Wohnseifer * 1967 in Cologne, currently lives and works in Cologne and Erftstadt and teaches as professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. His video works, photographs, sculptures and installations contain many references to design, art history and are as well denoted to an analysis of our everyday life, which has been shaped by mass media, in which the hierarchies of the intellectual and the undemanding have become obsolete. Painting, a focal point of his oeuvre, often contains multi-layered, historical references to society, economy, design and pop. It takes up everyday culture determined by mass media and can be understood as a contemporary answer to Pop Art of the 1960s. The artist’s works are represented in many international collections, including Saatchi Gallery, London; Boros Collection, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germanyin Berlin. The artist is represented by Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Innsbruck/Vienna, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Johann König, Berlin and Casey Kaplan, New York, Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf and Meliksetian I Briggs, Los Angeles.
https://www.galeriethoman.com/
Kunst & Denker Contemporary
BANZ & BOWINKEL
Banz & Bowinkel
Giulia Bowinkel, 1983 born in Düsseldorf 2002-2008 Study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf Friedemann Banz, 1980 born in Mainz 2001-2007 Study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf Residencies/Awards 2020 VR ART PRIZE Working Grant by DKB & CAA, Berlin 2018 AURORA-School for Artist, Europäischer Fonds für regionale Kultur, Berlin 2017 Digital Sculpture Award, Institute of digital art, HfK+G Ulm2015 Project funding, Kunststiftung NRW, Germany2011 Bronner Residency of Kunststiftung NRW/Goethe Institut, Tel Aviv, Israel Selected Exhibitions Groupshows | Soloshows * 2021 Resonant Realities, HAL, Haus am Lützowplatz, BerlinTHE ARTIST IS ONLINE – DIGITAL PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES IN A VIRTUAL WORLD, KÖNIG | ST. AGNES DECENTRALANDAbstract Art in The Age of New Media, MoCDA, Museum of Contemporary Digital Art 2020 New Waves, Kunst & Denker Contemporary, Düsseldorf Highlights der Sammlung 21. Jahrhundert, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld Bukarest Artworlds at the Wrong Biennale, Rezidenta BRD Scena 9, Bukarest Pixelfest Digital Utopia, Yeltsin Center YekaterinburgAV Experimental – Unpainted, ANALOG ROOM Dubai 2019 Glowing Globe, Kortil Gallery, RijekaV für Verantwortung, Kunstverein Wolfsburg Anders wohnen – Dystopie, Haus Esters, Museum Krefeld Gestalten – ein Jahrhundert abstrakte Kunst im Westen, Kunsthaus NRW Transfer Download, Spring/Break Art Show LA, Los AngelesIN MEDIAS RES, Kunstverein Arnsberg 2018 ENVISIONING THE FUTURE, Halcyon Arts Lab, Washington DCArtificial Paradise?, KM – Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz DIE ZUKUNFT DER ZEICHNUNG: ALGORITHMUS, Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach Disorder of Appearance, Kunst & Denker Contemporary, Düsseldorf * Digital Sculpture, Museum Ulm 2017 Digital Bodies, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan *
Fabian Erik Patzak
Fabian Erik Patzak At Home Between Two Worlds Fabian Erik Patzak’s painted exploration of his family’s traces between Europe and the U.S. Without diving into the complexities of why certain objects are charged with more meaning than others, and are thus more exciting than others when translated into visual art, the works in this series undoubtedly carry such weight. They are of everyday objects such as airplanes or credit cards – or at least they were in pre-pandemic times. That being the case, Patzak lends these objects a presence and esthetic charge sometimes found in portraiture, such as in the 1832 depiction of the publisher Bertin by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The objects in Patzak’s works speak to us and tell us a story of flight and of not feeling at home anywhere and at the same time the ability to make anywhere feel like home. This experience is not just particular to the story of Fabian Erik Patzak’s family, but is also prototypical for the globalized world in which we live – albeit currently on a somewhat more virtual level. The tension inherent in the very detailed and literal paintings of the objects and their larger, overall metaphoric character is what makes up the particular appeal of these paintings. Ocean liners as icons of travel in the early twentieth century and airplanes as the same of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have an air of historical reminiscence against the backdrop of our current reality. The fact that these paintings do not only relate a general story but also a concrete one, namely that of Patzak’s grandparents’ flight from the Nazis, lends them a multifaceted quality and depth characteristic of great art. Wolfgang Pichler
KÖNIG GALERIE BERLIN
Jeremy Shaw
For a new body of unique silkscreen works, Jeremy Shaw uses documentary images culled from newspaper archives. The subjects depicted in the prints appear to be experiencing an excessive spiritual, somatic or technological altered state of consci-ousness. It’s unclear if the subjects are still alive, but they certainly haunt the present. The source photographs have been refracted in-camera through various effect lenses in the process of reshooting, skewing the subjects poses and proportions to illust-rate a subjective experience upon which one can only speculate. Rolled-back eyes reverberate in a feedback loop, mouths open ever wider to either ingest the world or eternally scream, arms extend freakishly upwards in a selfless act of praise or surren-der to vicissitude. The mediation of historical images by analog means (no digital manipulation or output) in the tactile medium of silkscreen further obscures their date of production in a manner akin to Shaw’s filmic works. The parenthetical parts of the artworks’ titles are taken from fragments of text found on the back side of the archival source photos – a corresponding newspaper clip or notes made by the original photographer themselves – and offer little evidence as to the primary date and location; the images remain suspended in time. Could it be that these restless souls, whose only obstacle is never getting high enough, finally find a home in such an image and properly transcend to their desired utopias?
KÖNIG GALERIE
Galerie Frank Elbaz PARIS
MICHAEL HORSKY
Michael Horsky’s paintings seem crystallized from some sort of chromatic primeval slime. Constellations of motifs that leave everything obvious behind them—art history/role models/the good idea—appear on the canvas, though not before countless other images have been shaken off, discarded. Horsky draws from deeply hidden inner networks of knowledge and feeling, as well as the inherent laws that govern them. The outer, representational pictorial structure is merely a surface to project upon, a plaything, or an indicator for the abstract processes at work behind it. Forms are liberated from the gravity of logic, not deformed; colors unfurl the wildly beguiling power of their essence; narratives shatter against the paradox of their individual parts, only to further incite intuition. Horsky’s paintings are oddly captivating equivalents for a world—our world— that, despite its real, barely comprehensible madness, mysteriously manages to function and, against all reason, is capable of creating amazing beauty. – Sonja Menches
https://www.galeriefrankelbaz.com/
LETO POLEN
Radek Szlaga
The presentation consists of the latest paintings by Radek Szlaga, created on the basis of his study of the language of painting as a medium and considering underestimated narratives and relations between art, information and knowledge. In the artist’s latest works, travellers’ boasts, drunken stories and news offered by the so called mainstream media gain a similar level of import and cognitive value. The disturbance in the hierarchy of sources is very clear on the level of both the method of painting and technique. When ‘building’ new canvases, Szlaga uses his own existing works as source material. Images that differ temporally, thematically or formally become a new, multi-layered whole. In this way, the artist not only discusses an individual’s contemporary approach to information, but also ‘sums up’ his own work, giving it a new meaning and examining it from a distance. The presentation can be seen as a peculiar atlas —elements are bound together to make up the individual works show the entire spectrum of the themes he has been working with thus far. Long-term artistic analyses of subjects such as identity, painting and the relationship between the centre and the periphery are joined on a single plane. Szlaga pays particular attention to the nature of the map and its variants, such as the globe or the atlas as symbols of a culture dominated by visuality, in which ‘I see’ means both ‘I know’ and ‘I possess’.
Smolka Contemporary
Kaja Clara Joo
Kaja Clara Joos Arbeiten changieren stets an der Schnittstelle zwischen Plastik und Bild. Kulturelle und soziale Phänomene sowie Verhaltensmuster stehen hierbei im Mittelpunkt. Es entstehen organisch wirkende und akribisch choreographierte Skulpturen. Das Medium der Fotografie, welches oftmals als begleitendes Element zum Einsatz kommt, wird dabei als physischer Prozess verstanden. Sei es im Sinne eines Materials, welches bei Lichteinfall schwärzt oder als intervenierender Moment zwischen taktilen und narrativen Spuren. Über die rein stoffliche Berührung hinweg wird abgetastet, erforscht und konserviert. Dem Betrachter soll sich ein Gespann eröffnen, welches über im Raum inszenierte Komponenten Bruchstücke einer größeren Erzählung offenbaren.
MARTINETZ KÖLN
Sophia Süßmilch
Sophia Süßmilch bewegt sich virtuos zwischen den unterschiedlichen Medien. In ihren Performances und fotografischen Selbstportraits reflektiert sie häufig auf Körpernormierungen und Identitätsmuster, die unsere Fremd- und Eigenwahrnehmung gleichermaßen prägen. Mit viel Humor nimmt sie Kategorien wie Geschlecht, Alter oder Beruf in den Blick und spielt mit Zuschreibungen und Klischees, die darauf rekurrieren. In ihren Gemälden entführt sie die Betrachter oft in Parallelwelten voller merkwürdiger Wesen, die mehr mit uns zu tun haben, als man auf den ersten Blick meinen möchte. Nicht selten sind es die hintersinnigen Titel ihrer Arbeiten, die die grotesken Wesen auf ihren Leinwänden in einen Bezugsrahmen zu unserer Lebensrealität setzen. Sophia Süßmilch skilfully moves between various media. Her performances and photographic self portraits often reflect on bodily norms and identity patterns that shape our perception of others and ourselves in equal measure. She humorously tackles categories such as gender, age or profession and plays with attributions and stereotypes that refer back to them. Her paintings often transport the viewer into parallel worlds full of strange creatures that have more to do with us than one might at first think. It is frequently the cryptic titles of her works that bring the grotesque creatures appearing on her canvases into a frame of reference with the reality of our lives.
MARTINETZ
galerie michaela stock
Sandro Đukić
At the booth of galerie michaela stock the Croatian New Media artist Sandro Đukić deals with the changing relationships of media such as photography and video, but also with computer-controlled mechanisms. Language as Ideology is a multimedia work – the installation including the digital archive on history of mining generated by computer algorithm, the video Daydream and a a large-format photograph from the Ironfactory Sisak – dealing with the issue of time, that is, duration and the transience of socio-historical phenomenon. Installation “arch_0001_276 / GAME OVER – wish to reconsider reality?” from 2021 is based on 10 years research on workers and miners heritage from town Labin in Istria. As a part of long term project Sandro Đukić was leading digitalization of documents and periodic for beginning of the 20 century until nowadays. Finally, over 9000 pages where processed with OCR software and text was split in six groups; from early period 1900 to 1920, telegraph correspondence between miners office in Labin and head office in Vienna – company managing strike breaks, rising after WW II optimism and glorifying productivity until collapse of socialism, until transitional period of nowadays. All text was subject of “text mining”, text analyzing procedure, based on Noam Chomsky theory, and it was created lexicon / dictionary for each period. Using that dictionary, generated by computer algorithm, the text was produced. Despite sometime strange construction, one can with ease recognize the period as well as economy, culture as well as language as tool of ideology of the specific time. Finally, all that text, over 6000 sentences, become content of the Artist Books and prints as part of the installation.
WAS A GREAT OPENING, WITH FAIR SPACE FOR EACH GALLERY, GOOD ART GOOD ARTIST
FREE FOOD AND DRINKS ALL WAS HAPPY AFTER SO LONG LOCKDOWN!
MANY THANKS
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