What does a museum look like behind the scenes?
Klaus Pichler – Shark at the Museum of Natural History, Vienna, 2010, from Skeletons in the Closet
“What does a museum look like behind the scenes?” was the question Austrian photographer Klaus Pichler found himself asking after seeing the unusual sight of museum exhibits in storage.
See how these hypnotic installations transform rooms
Peter Kogler – Dimensions, 2011
Peter Kogler is a renowned artist from Austria that currently works and lives in Vienna. Kogler is best known for his different psychedelic room installations. Through his paintwork and his intricate projections, he transforms ordinary looking rooms and spaces such as lobbies, galleries, and transit centers by making them look twisted, warped or distorted, which in turn has a psychedelic effect for the public.
Kogler’s room installations explore vital concepts in his art such as modularity and repetition. The rooms alter one’s perception of architecture, which serves as the primary medium for his art. Aside from his dizzying rooms, Kogler is also an important performance, film and video artist as well as a sculptor.
Large scale works by Jeff Koons, Cy Twombly and others
Cy Twombly – Bacchus, Eiserner Vorhang (Iron Curtain) 2010-11, Vienna State Opera, Vienna, Austria
Safety Curtain is an on-going exhibition series taking place in the Vienna State Opera, Austria. The exhibition transforms the safety curtain into a temporary show for contemporary artists every year. The Vienna Opera has been hosting art shows since 1869 and tries to find new and interesting ways to address viewers as well as attract new audiences. However, it is also well known for being a world-class destination for global opera lovers as well as Renaissance Revival architecture.
For now 20 seasons, the Vienna Opera’s safety curtain has included art that has been specifically made for the opera house. The Safety curtain has featured a list of impressive artists such as John Baldessari, Cy Twombly, Tacita Dean, Matthew Barney, Jeff Koons, David Hockney, and Franz West just to mention a few of the famous names.
Why do these massive piles of rubble fill up art spaces?
Lara Almarcegui – Construction Rubble of Secession’s Main Hall, 2010, Installation View, Secession, Vienna, Austria
Spanish born Lara Almarcegui who currently lives in Rotterdam has always had a deep curiosity for examining processes of contemporary transformation that are brought about by the social, political and economic transformations in society. Since the early 1990s, Lara has examined urban areas that most artists choose not focus on such as rubble from construction materials and stuff from wastelands. Lara carefully catalogs and highlights each location’s inclination towards entropy or lack of order and predictability.
Her projects vary based on the intention of the message. For instance, she developed a guide to the wastelands in Amsterdam consisting of materials used to establish the wasteland in its raw form. Lara has managed to consolidate a reputation for herself as a respectable and revered artist in the global artist realm. In 2013, her work allowed her to act as Spain’s only representative in the 55th Venice Biennial.
Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures are refreshing
Since the late 1990s Austrian artist, Erwin Wurm is working on his on-going One Minute Sculpture series in which he or others pose with everyday objects, often within an art space.
Out of this world: Volcanic ash pyramids fill up museums
Magdalena Jetelová – Domestication of Pyramids, Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria
Domestication of Pyramids by Magdalena Jetelová are pyramid-sculptures, covered by volcanic ashes, and have been shown at the Museum of Applied Arts / Vienna, Martin-Gropius-Bau / Berlin, National Museum of Contemporary Art / Warsaw, Irish Museum of Modern Art / Dublin, Forum Kunst Rottweil and other art spaces.
The Viennese Museum of Applied Arts is a typical example of Ringstrasse architecture: an elegant, richly ornamented Neo-Renaissance building with an inner peristyle hall and galleries. Upon entering the building, the visitor finds himself/herself, surprisingly, in a darkened, curved space: soon he/she discovers that he/she is standing under large, slanted scaffolding. He/she instinctively walks to the right, where there is a way out. When he/she returns to the daylight, he/she finds himself/herself in the Museum hall, standing next to a thirteen-meter high tilted wall covered in red silica sand. The wall slices the inner space of the Museum diagonally across two floors, slashing razor-like through pillars and balustrades up to the ceiling. The wall, tilted at a 45° angle and with a base thirty-five meters long, is a fragment of one side of a pyramid which could continue in the exterior of the Museum building. A space on a scale which greatly exceeds the size of the host building is inserted into the museum’s interior. Despite its dimensions, it is only a fragment of a whole known to us, which in an imaginary way continues beyond the borders of the Museum building and which we can mentally reconstruct as a pyramid.
Domestication primarily stems from the fact that we can already imagine it based on the fragment we have at our disposal because we have become well acquainted with its form in our minds. On the entirely specific level, domestication—taming—can be seen in the possibility of walking around the pyramid from all sides, from the inside as well as from the outside; taking a look at its base from the gallery above, experiencing it from a perspective that people were to be denied. This, however, does not change anything about the fact that the essence of the form is mental, not physical. The entire pyramid is only realized through thought.
The intersection of the eastern archetypal monument—the pyramid—and its absolute geometry with‘humanized’ western architecture, its small details and scale, raises questions concerning the nature of our culture, whereby our stable coordinates which anchor us in the world become relative. Other pyramids have been constructed at various locations in Europe, but only in Vienna is the pyramid physically accessible both from the inside and outside; in Warsaw and Berlin the surface of the structure can be observed from the outside, which, because it is covered with volcanic ashes, evokes the feeling of a full compact mass, poured into the form of a heap. The confrontation of the eastern monument and European cultural history takes place differently each time, and yet on the same principle. The domestication of absolute architecture takes place in our minds.
Magdalena Jetelová – Domestication of Pyramids, Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria
Magdalena Jetelová – Domestication of Pyramids, Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria
Magdalena Jetelová – Domestication of Pyramids
Magdalena Jetelová – Domestication of Pyramids
Magdalena Jetelová – Domestication of Pyramids
Magdalena Jetelová – Domestication of Pyramids, Forumkunst Rottweil, Rottweil, Germany
Magdalena Jetelová – Domestication of Pyramids
Independent non-profit arts organization established in 2011 in Seoul, South Korea. Projects in 1/3 of the world's countries.
