This year the Contemporary Vienna art fair takes place at the majestic Renaissance Kursalon building that opens up to a beautiful park in central Vienna.
In comparison to the Parallel Vienna, its a small art fair but no less significant in the art event filled month of September in Vienna.
The Vienna art fair presents exciting newcomers, established galleries, and a curated special with exhibitions focusing on the Central- and Eastern European countries.
For all who plan to visit the fair this weekend, enjoy this years central location and walk around the city, explore all of its cultural attractions, and explore some of Viennas prominent galleries nearby.
Here we share some of our old time favourites as well some new discoveries.
BOOTH - E01
Present the artists:
Adela Giurgiu, Virginia Toma, and Ghiulvessi Vladiana.
The Jecza gallery returns to Vienna Contemporary as Basic Projects
Basic Projects developed out of the aim to take a closer look on the questions and ideas that stimulate artistic practices today, being committed to look at art not from a geographical perspective, instead returning back to the work and its storyline.
Basic Projects by Jecza Gallery serves as a departure platform for emerging artists from Romania and abroad.
Its mission is to provide to artists a context for exchange, dialogue, presentation and production.
Basic Projects is founded and run by Andrei Jecza and Alina Șerban.
ZONE 1 - BOOTH Z4
Georg Kargl Fine Arts presents new prints by Agnieszka Polska, all related to her museum exhibition The Thousand-Year Plan, Museum of Modern Art, Warsawa, and “The Longing Gaze”, a work that reflects how highly developed surveillance spy on us and record our living.
This was during the Corona crises the only gateway to the world.
The images taken from surveillance cameras are interwoven with a poetic text by Agnieszka Polska appealing relationships in connection with intimate togetherness.
BOOTH A13
Second Booth A13 contains works by David Fesl, Katrina Daschner, David Maljkovic and Rosa Rendl.
GROUND FLOOR – BOOTH 12
We discovered the gallery KOW Berlin 2 years ago at the first SPARK Art Fair and have admired their selection of artists ever since. This year at the Vienna Contemporary they present 4 Austrian artists:
Heinrich Dunst, Sophie Gogl, Simon Lehner and Oswald Oberhuber.
Heinrich Dunst was born in 1955 in Hallein (Salzburg, Austria), He lives and works in Vienna.
Dunst creates spatial interventions and performances that navigate the gap between what can be seen and what can be said, the untranslatability of one form into another, and the contextual nature of spatial presentations.
Dunst‘s conceptual approach is rooted both in the work of artists like Marcel Broodthaers who scrutinize the systems underlying the perception of words and images, and in the Viennese scene of the 1980s and its characteristic ambition to extend abstract painting into the exhibition space.
He lends these complex issues fresh interest by developing forms into correlations and pointedly questioning the seemingly unequivocal meaning of the elements through variation, superimposition, and changes of direction.
Sophie Gogl was born in 1992 in Kitzbühel, Austria, and studied pain-ting at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna with Prof. Judith Eisler.
Gogl addresses the question of what narratives painted images can achieve in the face of an infinite world of images that appear and disappear again between the Internet, films, advertising and private motifs, often brought forth and sucked back in by data streams.
Where the painter‘s gaze drifts into the offside, sometimes ab-surd, spaces in the imaginable and possibilities of a contemporary painting are revealed.
Time and again, Gogl‘s practice also includes installations and combinations of different media.
Her first solo exhibitions took her to the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna (2020) and the Galerie der Stadt Schwaz (2020), as well as a group exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern (2020). In 2021 she had her first solo exhibition at KOW.
Simon Lehner‘s still young work—the Vienna-based artist was born in 1996—is characterized by a recurring traumatic structure.
A structure in which human emotions and memories converge with processes of artificial intelligence that reconstruct the past, the buried or the repressed, but also deform it and remove it from human control. In this way, works are created that draw on private and public image archives and work on a contemporary iconography of the psychic state of emergency.
A state that not least shakes male self images, which are in any case and rightly in question, but which Lehner also problematizes as a highly ambivalent question of identity and toxic masculinity. Lehner moves pictorially between classical photography, digital forms of production, and painting.
Oswald Oberhuber‘s oeuvre originates from the spirit of informal art of the post-war period, art that no longer liked to adhere to classical principles of form and composition.
Oberhuber contributed to this awakening with his informal sculptures. But the Austrian, born in 1931, soon went further: in 1956 he declared formlessness to be the general maxim of his artistic practice - and an attitude to life.
He borrowed Leon Trotsky‘s concept of „permanent revolution“ and made „permanent change“ the watchword of his negation of aesthetic and social norms.
In this way, his emerging life‘s work opened itself up to recurring leaps and transformations and moved with chutzpah across all media for six decades.
In addition, Oberhuber was influential in cultural and educational politics and shaped artistic attitudes of several generations. The two-time documenta participant, who also represented Austria at the 1972 Ve- nice Biennale, died in Vienna in 2020.
GROUND FLOOR | BOOTH - A12
The Persons Project present Jakub Julian Ziółkowski.
Jakub Julian Ziółkowski is known for his ability to link together the human and the supernatural in his paintings.
His ceramics continue the spiritual dialogue from his paintings, blurring the line between divine abstractions and clear human anatomy.
ZONE 1 - BOOTH Z02
The Polansky gallery presents in a solo presentation the most recent paintings of Šimon Sýkora.
Šimon Sýkora (b. 1990 in Pilsen, Czech Republic, lives and works in Vienna) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Prague in 2019. Sýkora’s spookily melancholic paintings explore the hazy realms of wanderers and misfits.
Existing in a reality that is almost violently Bataillean, the artist’s work explores the more internalized notions of the human condition which is rather imperceptible, but agonizingly present and powerful in shaping one’s reality.
Galerie Eva Presenhuber proudly presents a statement by Tobias Pils at Vienna Contemporary 2022 in celebration of the opening of a new gallery location in Vienna earlier this year.
The main gallery at Lichtenfelsgasse 5 1010 Vienna will showcase new works by Karen Kilimnik from September 9 – October 22 2022.
FIRST FLOOR - BOOTH E08
The Austrian Gallery Raum mit Licht presents artworks from the artists:
Sarah Bogner, Karin Fisslthaler, Ernst Koslitsch, Olena Newkryta, Roman Pfeffer, Titania Seidl, Andrea van der Straeten and Josef Zekoff.
B02 & Z01
The Ravnikar Gallery Space presents the artist Nika Kupyrova.
Project
Taking its name from a randomly generated WLAN password, work series Yaekahngai considers the screen to be a portal to hypothetical parallel worlds, with entry prerequisite to having access to the right gate and the correct digital key.
The artist re-imagines the exhibition space as a system driven by a subterranean mushroom network – and yet the pseudo-organic algorithmic repetition of shapes and hues is more similar to an immersive computer game than it is to a real forest.
Sculptures, reminiscent of standing stones, mark the points of transition into mythological realms – or have we already passed into another world unwillingly?
Biography
Nika Kupyrova (1985 in Kyiv, Ukraine) is living and working in Vienna and Prague. She studied Painting at the Edinburgh College of Art, Fine Arts at the Iceland University of the Arts and Transdisciplinary Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
FIRST FLOOR- E05
Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman present the artist Thomas Feuerstein.
Thomas Feuerstein was born in Innsbruck in 1968, lives and works in Vienna. He studied art history and philosophy at the University of Innsbruck, doctorate 1995.
From 1992 to 1994 co-editor, with Klaus Strickner, of the magazine Medien. Kunst.Passagen, published by Passagen Verlag Vienna. 1992 founded the office for intermedia communication transfer and the association medien.kunst.tirol.
1992 and 1993 research commissions from the Austrian Ministry of Science on art in electronic space and art and architecture.
Since 1997 lectures and seminars at the University of Innsbruck, Hochschule für Musik und Theater Berne, F + F Zurich, Technical College Intermedia Dornbirn, University Mozarteum Salzburg, University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Feuerstein was awarded the Austrian Art Award for Media Art 2019. Since 2020 Feuerstein has been teaching as professor for artistic discourse at the Institute for Experimental Architecture at the University of Innsbruck.
