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2005
wall drawing
mixed media on paper
framed, 180 x 125 cm each
Strabag Kunstforum, Vienna, AT
The exhibition space is located on the top floor of a building of the Austrian construction corporation STRABAG facing Vienna’s UnoCity. The room has glass windows in all directions, offering a panoramic view of the city. The only walls are those surrounding the building’s load-bearing core, which enclose the skyscraper’s elevator machine rooms. In order to avoid having to add to the small hanging space by installing the usual movable walls, a work was conceived that would be open to this particular situation. Ten large framed paper works were simply set against the walls of the elevator core, which had been painted gray up to half their total height, or 5.25 ft, creating a reflection of the horizon of the building’s full-circle panorama view in its core. The framed drawings are large works on paper that internally play through the principle of the layering and merging of different material and motivic levels. Collaged onto a board wall consisting of horizontal planks realized in frottage on tissue paper are several types of drawings in various techniques: birds—including the title’s tauben (the word can mean pigeons as well as deaf ones), which resemble tourists in cities like Florence—faces, abstract moiré patterns, grids loosely painted with a brush, and empty white sheets. The use of tissue paper, which leads to the near-disappearance of the drawing’s ground as the layer immediately underneath it shines through, alludes to an illusionistic synthesis of the material layers, which is disrupted by the more opaque sheets. The layering of drawing and counterfeit board wall continues in that of board wall and paper ground, paper ground and frame, framed drawing and spatial situation. The glass covering the drawings, which rise to a height of 5.9 ft, reflects the panoramic vista of the city from the building.