ART CITIES:Zurich-Gerwald Rockenschaub
The work of the Austrian artist Gerwald Rockenschaub, has been associated with Neo-Geo since the early ‘80s, when a group of young artists concentrated on the formal vocabulary of the abstract avant-garde. Neo-Geo permeated the aesthetics of American Minimal Art with the consumeristic position of Pop Art.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Eva Presenhuber Gallery Archive
Gerwald’s Rockenschaub work cannot be simply categorized in any particular style, however, in his works, he refers in equal measure to ideas and positions of modernism and to phenomena of everyday culture. In an act of radical reduction and concentration (the two basic principles of the artist’s method), these are scaled down to bare essentials. His spatial installations in the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 1993 can on the one hand be understood as minimalistic objects, while at the same time referring to the exhibiting conditions of contemporary art in the so-called white cube. He intervenes directly in the architecture of various exhibition spaces to expose or reverse the relationship between beholder, artwork, and the space, so that the exhibition visitors themselves become an aesthetic component of the installation. In 2007 he was featured at Documenta 12 with several works. In “Bend it” his solo exhibition at the Galerie Eva Presenhuber, he is showing a new group of works, Rockenschaub has assembled recent wall pieces made of overlapping sheets of plexiglass. The artist has combined these works with painted surfaces in an installation one can enter, in which the boundaries between two- and three-dimensionality are blurred. In the work of Gerwald Rockenschaub both aspects are equally acknowledged. The artist deliberately designs his works in such a way that the act of seeing itself comes to the fore as a consequence of what is seen.
Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Maag Areal, Zahnradstrasse 21, Zurich, Duration: 7/11/15-23/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, http://presenhuber.com
