Location: Orangery
Gironcoli: Context
André | Bacon | Barney | Beuys | Bourgeois | Klauke | Nauman | Schwarzkogler | West
Bruno Gironcoli (1936–2010) holds a singular position in contemporary international sculpture. The Austrian artist arrived at an unmistakable language of form, which he developed further from early filigree wire objects to the gigantic sculptures of the last two decades. Simultaneously, he produced a comprehensive œuvre of works on paper and drawings that continuously accompanied his evolution as a sculptor. As Kasper König writes in his preface to the Biennial catalogue of 2003, Bruno Gironcoli has not yet met with the reception that would be due to him as one of the most outstanding practitioners of contemporary sculpture of his generation. Two years after his death and fourteen years after his last major solo exhibition at the Vienna Museum of Applied Arts (1997), it thus seems all the more important to undertake a reassessment of his work within an exhibition that will be the first to present him as a significant and prominent exponent of international contemporary art. Gironcoli will not be conceived as
a traditional retrospective, but will place the artist’s oeuvre within a network of references to both classical and relevant contemporary approaches in an unprecedented fashion. The exhibition will comprise some fifteen works by Bruno Gironcoli dating from 1958 to 2009. They will serve as a starting point to discuss such diverse themes as Corporeality/Sexuality, Effigy/Portrait, Space/Surface,
Ritual/Obsession, Fetish/Gender, etc. through the juxtaposition with works by artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Alberto Giacometti and Joseph Beuys, Carl André, Bruce Nauman, the Actionists Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, as well as Jürgen Klauke, Louise Bourgeois, and Matthew Barney.
