Gerwald Rockenschaub 'If I ever Had The Chance again, I'd Probably do the same'
1 octobre - 26 novembre 2011
Following Gerwald Rockenschaub's major retrospective, held in
Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum April - September 2011, Galerie
Thaddaeus Ropac now presents a comprehensive exhibition of
new works by the artist. After his room-specific installations at the
last documenta in Kassel (2007) and his simple but effective
design for the exterior of the temporary Kunsthalle ["art hall"] on
the Berlin Schlossplatz, Wolfsburg was his third major project
within only a few years. Here, at an angle in the monumental
interior, he erected a wall 70m long and 11m high, the front of
which he filled completely with hundreds of different pictographic
motifs. For the viewer, this resulted in a deliberate sensory
overload – a telling comment on our everyday world, inundated as
it is with advertising and visual stimuli.
In our Salzburg exhibition, Rockenschaub is showing new works created in 2011, from the two series
Pralinen [chocolates] and Intarsien [marquetry], a series of sculptures and some wall objects made in
the process of his work on the Wolfsburg exhibition. The Pralinen are a series of small-scale, painted,
cuboid wooden objects, which in their setting are reminiscent of the design of luxury confectionery.
The Intarsien, also of wood, are based on the type of inlaid work that flourished during the Italian
Renaissance. Different varieties of wood veneer are laid on a flat surface to form patterns of varying
colours and structures. The geometric aesthetic of Rockenschaub's sculptures shows the design
process using the CAD program Vectorworks, popular amongst Apple users, while at the same time
they are strongly reminiscent of models of Russian constructivist architectural fantasies. The wall
objects are based on motifs from the Wolfsburg show but, unlike that wall, here the icons are
transferred from foil applications into the higher-value medium of milled and painted wood objects
about 5 cm. in depth. These works, somewhere between hard-edge aesthetic and DIY romanticism,
are typical of Rockenschaub's ideology-free fluctuation between "high" and popular culture.
The work of the Austrian artist Gerwald Rockenschaub (b 1952) has been associated with the term
"neo-geo" since the early 1980s, which saw the formation of a group of young artists who used the
formal vocabulary of the abstract avant-garde. Neo-geo permeated the aesthetic of American minimal
art with the consumeristic attitude of pop art. Rockenschaub's work cannot, however, be categorised
simply as a specific style. In his animations, in the Pralinen and Intarsien – which draw on classic
panel painting –, in the wall objects, sculptures and room-specific installations, he relates in equal
measure to ideas and positions of the modern age and to phenomena of everyday culture. In an act of
radical reduction and concentration (the two basic principles of Rockenschaub's method) these are
reduced to their essential element Rockenschaub's pictures are no longer based on the social or metaphysical utopias found in the
pioneers of abstraction, but on abstract codes and patterns from the everyday world. Rockenschaub
undermines the "characterisation" of the picture by deliberately withdrawing everything that might
constitute individuality in a painting. Linear structures, individual geometric forms and colour fields
suggest a narrative level, which the viewer has to draw on his own store of images to decipher. The
aesthetic system of the Bauhaus, Kandinsky's abstract cosmos and the artistic concepts of pop art all
show their influence, in roughly equal measure.
Rockenschaub's pictures are no longer based on the social or metaphysical utopias found in the
pioneers of abstraction, but on abstract codes and patterns from the everyday world. Rockenschaub
undermines the "characterisation" of the picture by deliberately withdrawing everything that might
constitute individuality in a painting. Linear structures, individual geometric forms and colour fields
suggest a narrative level, which the viewer has to draw on his own store of images to decipher. The
aesthetic system of the Bauhaus, Kandinsky's abstract cosmos and the artistic concepts of pop art all
show their influence, in roughly equal measure.
For further details please contact
Dr. Arne Ehmann
+43 (0) 662 881 393-17
