"viennaline" curated_by

VIENNALINE
MAM MARIO MAURONER CONTEMPORARY ART VIENNA
by Lóránd Hegyi

For this year´s project Viennaline Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Vienna is presenting an exhibition in three parts, symbolizing the city's cultural complexity, its creative openness and innovative potential. The show highlights the Austrian capital with its often provocative intellectuality, within the context of the city´s international art scene and its representatives, that are having long standing relations to Vienna’s art life. Amongst those are famous paradigmatic masters of the last half century, that have been living for years in Vienna, actively shaping and influencing the arts and its discourse, such as Michelangelo Pistoletto. Teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the artist’s oeuvre and aesthetic approach has not just made an impact on his students but as well influenced generations of young artists.
Besides Pistoletto the exhibition is presenting middle generation artists, that work in their concepts with topics, questions and aesthetics on literary and scientific narratives, that were subject of discussion of Viennese intellectuals. The artworks of Kendell Geers and Bernardí Roig address theoretical, linguistic, aesthetic and architectonic ideas of the famous thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein and are immediately inspired by his fascinating and extensive oeuvre. Equally Ugo Giletta deals in his artworks with the theses of Wittgenstein or rather Otto Feininger’s concepts of thinking and ideas on essentiality. The graphical works by Sandra Vásquez de la Horra and Marine Joatton involves elements of psychoanalytic questions and accordingly of ideas on the unconsciousness, which are considered in a cultural-anthropological mystical and magical context.
The artworks of Barthélémy Toguo and Fabien Verschaere focus on symbols and signs of specific ritual practices, indicating common and popular as well as historic narratives. Barthélémy Toguo addresses African fertility rites, whereas Fabien Verschaere’s artworks highlight late middle-age, flemish and french ideas on belief in magic, fairy tales, witchcraft, passion-theatre and death cult.
All presented artists are having close relations to Vienna and are for years maintaining cultural exchange with the city, just as well are closely connected to its contemporary Viennese art scene. Further some of the artists’ have developed friendships with Viennese artists furthering the constant exchange of ideas on art, such as Fabien Verschaere and Franz West or Ugo Giletta and Hermann Nitsch.