Orangery, Lower Belvedere
30 May to 21 September 2008

Thanks to the generous donation from Thaddeus Ropac, 17 works of art of extraordinary quality by Julius Deutschbauer, Walter Obholzer, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Hubert Scheibl and Erwin Wurm are entering into the Belvedere Collection.
Julius Deutschbauer has been working on the “Library of Unread Books” for eleven years. This has amounted already to 500 interviews presenting books loved and unloved, forgotten and misplaced. “The Librarian” is interpreted once as a painting and once as a cast bronze and shows the artist as administrator of the unread. The “Deutschbauer-Potpourri” is a work in thirty parts with many literary references; it might be seen as a table of contents of his artistic oeuvre.
In his “Vertical Panoramas” Walter Obholzer casts light on the nowhere of the empty white wall of modern art; by means of historically connotative ornament he questions the placement of the image, yet also the conditions of painting itself. He understands painting as a self-referential system of thought, comparable with the structure of a fugue.
As starting point in his pictures Gerwald Rockenschaub calculates an area with 0 and 1 and works with the colour code derived from it. In composition he follows generations of technical applications, ranging from the visual aesthetics of the first computers to the latest programs for the design of digital user interfaces. The inflatable cube is a reference by Rockenschaub to minimal art, likewise to the architectural utopias of the 1960s.
Hubert Scheibl spattles several layers of paint on top of each other in his expansive paintings, scrapes and scratches to reveal what has been painted over, pursues hidden traces to lose himself in a universe of delineations, spots and black holes. Scheibl’s abstracts are impressive examples of a “way out to representing nature”, as Dan Cameron describes it.
Two of Erwin Wurms latest video works have now joined the Belvedere Collection. “Tell” is a film about the perception of reality. The borders between conversation, imagination and reality become blurred, if a car drives up a building façade and uses it as a parking space. In “Stand West” a person is put under hypnosis from sunrise to sunset in the expanses of a flat, Lower Austrian landscape and so becomes a performative sculpture.