Heimo Zobernig

Painting, along with sculpture, film, performance, and design, is a central component of the intermedia art of Heimo Zobernig. Since the beginning of his artistic practice in the early 1980s, the artist has built up a comprehensive painterly oeuvre, always based on his attempt to explore color like a “scientist.” Thus, in Zobernig’s work, painting has become a machine for the creation of insight. Characteristics of the artist’s method in this context are strategies of simplification, standardization, and systematization using predefined rules and the artistic appropriation of industrial norms and widespread samples (such as TV test patterns).

After mumok’s presentation of the consistent and yet utter multifaceted development of the internationally well-known Austrian artist in a first retrospective show in winter 2002/2003, this show will place its emphasis on Zobernig’s paintings, with select recent groups of works. The artist designed the exhibition architecture himself. With it, Zobernig references the classical-modernist architecture of the Sonsbeek Pavilion, which the Dutch designer Gerrit Rietvield created for a sculpture presentation in Arnheim in 1955.

Curated by Karola Kraus