The Kunsthalle Zürich launched its exhibition season at the Museum Bärengasse—where it is temporarily based until June 2012 while work is carried out on the conversion and renovation of its permanent home at the Löwenbräu Areal—with Zobernig's solo exhibition "ohne Titel (in Red)." In keeping with the rooms in the buildings of the Museum Bärengasse, which were constructed in 1670, the works selected for presentation focused on the topics of "furnishing" and "light," and played with the domesticated interior of the former residential buildings. Closing the shutters on the windows of the two early Baroque houses, Zobernig submerged the exhibition spaces in red light with his work "ohne Titel" produced in 1994. By doing so, concepts such as "display," "installation," "setting up," and "representation," as well as "site-specificity" for the idiosyncratic context of the spaces, were put up for discussion and confronted with the traditional understanding of the installation.
This publication attempts to transform the exhibition, treated as a retrospective—it showed a cross-section of Zobernig's artistic oeuvre from 1985 to the present—into book form. It includes an essay by Gregor Stemmrich in which he focuses on the understanding of the afore-mentioned concepts as well as on their affects on the perception of an art institution such as the Museum Bärengasse. This text not only reflects the exhibition "ohne Titel (in Red)," but provides an insight into Heimo Zobernig's practice and concerns in general. The publication is realized in close collaboration with the artist and contains numerous installation views.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich, from January to March 2011.
A key figure in the Austrian art scene and one of the most important artists of his generation, Heimo Zobernig (born in 1958 in Mauthen, works and lives in Vienna) has used a variety of media and means of expression, including video, performance, painting, sculpture, installation, architecture and design.
His protean practice explores and shakes up the formal and theoretical language of modernism, constructivism and geometric abstraction. In his painting, he thus diverts the modernist aesthetics of the monochrome or the grid. His interest in architecture and graphic design also reflects in his work, notably through the use of scenic devices such as fabric curtains or lighting to recreate monochrome environments for the exhibitions in which he installs his works.
Catalogues are also an essential part of Zobernig's practice. He challenges the norms of editorial production and the conventions of representation by using displacement and shifts in his printed materials.
