"Sculpture: Precarious Realism between the Melancholy and the Comical"
2004-10-15 until 2005-02-20
Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsquartier
Wien, , AT Austria

The exhibition “Sculpture. Precarious Realism between the Melancholy and the Comical” shows sculpture that celebrates realism, yet also questions the cogency of realism. The theme is not one of true
to
nature depictions. Sculpture becomes a mirror of another reality – a reality that is tired of beautiful appearances, which turns more to the intermediary tones, to a world of internalized fantasy, comic, and melancholy. Sculpture draws back from the triviality of the familiar and expresses feelings in a precarious and innovative world of new forms.

The sculptures show what is human and everyday, and at the same time observe the disappearance and dissolution of the ordinary in its transitions from the human/animal/organic to the machine
tool
like or architectural. The sculptures’ character is determined by the fragility of a form, which seems to emulate the real form, yet somehow “fails”: this “failure” is often what first actually grasps the character of what is being represented – in an existential, caricaturing, emphatic, or cheeky interpretation.

The exhibition pursues two journeys: the will to see the human subject act in paradoxical and strange interactions with a multifunctional and often resistant environment, and the desire to present strange, animated worlds of objects and machines, which present the onlooker with a latent, intimate parallel world.

This exhibition about sculpture can be seen as a continuation of the debate on the concept of realism, initiated in the past several years in the Kunsthalle Wien in exhibitions such as “A Baroque Party,” “Tableaux vivants,” and “Dear Painter, paint me…”

Artists: Lynda Benglis, Alighiero Boetti, Thomas Demand, Tom Claassen, Keith Edmier, Urs Fischer, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Giuseppe Gabellone, Isa Genzken, Matt King, Martin Kippenberger, Takehito Koganezawa, Tetsumi Kudo, Sarah Lucas, Mark Manders, David Moises, Richard Prince, Jason Reppert, Medardo Rosso, Thomas Schütte, Peter Senoner, Erik Steinbrecher, Yoshihiro Suda, Rebecca Warren, Franz West, Bill Woodrow, Erwin Wurm.

IMAGE
Peter Senoner
“LEM & Pseudoplatanus", 2004,
photo: Silja Addy, Courtesy the Artist,
LEM: Courtesy Private Collection Italy

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