This publication brings together two early works by Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig, Farben (Colours), an artist book first published some thirty years ago, and Alphabet, a series of twenty-six photographs taken in the early 1990s.
Because of the specific nature and sequence of both works, they are being combined here for the first time as two resonating entities. The dust jacket brings this combination of numbers and letters into contact with another, related element of Zobernig's oeuvre, the CMYK scheme for colour printing. At every turn, we seem to be looking at a manual of basic knowledge.
Limited edition of 500 numbered copies.
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.
