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2002
drawing:installation
walldrawing, drawings, framed
approx. 6 x 12 m
supersaat, Vienna, AT
The three-layered installation comprising wall paintings, an internal wall, and a block of drawings was realized for a solo show at a noncommercial exhibition space behind Vienna’s Westbahnhof railway station. The garage-like room’s right-hand side wall, which is subdivided by a column, was painted with five horizontal bands of blue in different degrees of lightness: a scale, growing darker from bottom to top, which crosses the illusion of the depth of a sky with the contrary association of overlapping layers of transparent paper. Projected onto this pattern by means of graphical illusion is the relief of a gestural brushstroke (first used in wirl, hanfbauer see also get lost). The traces of paint trickling down the wall are assigned to a vanishing point in the illusionary space located in the bottom left corner of the image field, at the far end of the room. At a distance of ca. 70 cm (28 in) from the wall painting, a fence element, rising to a height of 160 cm (63 in) and composed of planed wooden slats ca. 12 cm (4.7 in) wide, has been installed; after a bend near the far corner of the room, it continues in front of the white rear wall. Mounted on the entire surface of this support structure is a block of 90 drawings, framed and under glass, measuring 32 x 24 cm (12.6 x 9.4 in) each. Lacquered onto the wood and glass of the frames, which alternate between portrait (40 x 30 cm / 15.7 x 11.8 in) and landscape (40 cm x 50 cm / 15.7 x 19.7 in) formats, is a matte gray passepartout that reveals the drawings, which are in each instance placed off-center in the oversized frames.
The work is the first to lay out in complex fashion the possible ways of framing and unframing the image: from the material application in the real space, which is opened up across the entirety of a surface toward an illusionary space, to the insertion of a support structure, to the conventional combination of wood frame and glass, which in turn becomes the support medium for a final frame that is only painted, the work explores various degrees of severity in the demarcation of the boundary between pictorial and real space. Thwarting the confinement of each individual drawing into the double frame structure, a landscape motif running through multiple drawings creates an illusionary space that partly negates the framing and resonates with the continuous space of the wall painting.