Franz Vana. ARBEITEN : SCHLAFEN @ Sol LeWitt’s Wall. Performed

In the exhibition Sol LeWitt's Wall. Performed, the conceptual painter Franz Vana follows on from the performative interventions Protocols for Utopia by Jasmina Cibic, Franz Jochum and Winfried Ritsch. Under the theme of work and labor, Vana counters LeWitt's constructed wall with both conceptually and physically tangible painterly settings that confront the monumental wall as compositions of shapes.

Franz Vana (* 1951) uses language and formal painting discourses for his distanced and surreal pictorial analyses. The serial combination of related vocabularies in word and image becomes a conceptual method of testing established imaginary worlds. Humor sometimes serves him as a weapon against himself, irrational ideas are pursued just as logically and consistently. Vana's consistency of critical and precise painting, honed over decades, makes him one of the most interesting outsiders in Austrian art of his generation and an exemplary counterpart to Sol LeWitt's conceptual artwork of the modular wall drawn into the space.

So-called word pictures alternate with Sunday pictures. Where semantic recombinations appear on the one side, geometric shapes and forms are combined on the other. Reconfiguring becomes a poetological game and an investigation of irrational patterns and narratives.