Reducing things to the point at which nothing else can be omitted and everything has nevertheless been said is characteristic of Heimo Zobernig’s modus operandi. Always taking human proportions into consideration and aware that everything that he produces is art, he touches on all spheres of life, setting up and allowing us to come up against new boundaries that we can experience, putting the spotlight on things that already exist so as to allow us to perceive and to enable things yet to come.
Using cheap materials, he detaches simple aspects from profoundly complex situations, allowing them to serve as agents for new things. Precision, stringent titling of all of his works as Untitled, using only the Helvetica typeface and formats that allow for and reformulate conditions of space and content are characteristic of his mode of thinking.
At the same time, Zobernig encourages an intermeshing of different disciplines and practices of art. In the same way that a denotation can become a banner, language an image, performance a video, video a painting, painting a sculpture, and sculpture a piece of furniture or architecture, so too can architecture morph into an exhibition space.
In this way, together with Eric Kläring, in 2013 Zobernig created an approximately 12sqm project space in the courtyard of Kunsthaus Graz as a structure that is equally a sculpture, architecture and exhibition space. Reduced to the floor slab that has shed its three-dimensional shell, he distils a piece that not only explores the topic of pedestal and sculpture from a new angle, but also bestows it with fresh potential by means of his formulation.
Developed as a stand-alone artwork in the Sculpture Park, it pans out new opportunities as a wall-less open project space available for use by other artists. Within this ambivalence and extension of the sculpture concept, students of Textual Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, who are visiting as artists in residence this year, are invited to create stand-alone, intermeshing works for this space in an initial phase.
