Kunsthaus Curator’s Statement
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910 Santa Fe #15, Denver, Colorado, USA upstairs in the 910 Arts Complexin Denver's Art District on Santa Fe720.230.4566 • alicia (at) abecedariangallery.comOpen by appointment |
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Kunsthaus Curator’s Statement During the winter of 2011, I began considering how to bring over and show Austrian art in the United States. I grew up in Austria and the United States and am active as an artist in both countries. For several years I had been considering a mobile gallery link between the two countries. SemiPublic Gallery in Asheville, North Caroliina, offered one of their 2011 show slots. In spring 2011 I brought over the first suitcase full of Austrian art.With revisions, the show then traveled to Abecedarian Gallery for exhibition in 2012. The three Austrian artists I invited to participate in KunstHaus all share a similar gestural vibrancy and visual spontaneity. In addition, all three artists live and work in Gmunden on Lake Traunsee. I visited the studios of Sylvia Vorwagner and Ottilie Grossmayer to select work for Kunsthaus. Peter Eder wanted to show his series Aunt Emmy, which up until now has only been seen by his immediate family. While the full range of the artists’ individual work varies - in style, subject matter and medium - the work selected for this show is all mixed media on paper. Peter Eder’s Aunt Emmy is the culmination of a year-long graphic response to a family photo album inherited from his aunt. Individual pages have been painted over, photographs altered or removed, the aunt’s handwritten notes either left visible or added to. Through this process, Peter attempted to re-establish a connection to a person he used to know well and also to artistically explore places, memories and emotions not his own. Ottilie Grossmayer’s screen prints can be viewed as a study of two themes – poetry and word-play. Selected excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s four quartets - little gidding and Hannes Vyoral’s aus der Wildnis are graphically presented in a square format. The second theme, which Ottilie has focused on for several years, is the visual play on words, either through their double meaning or the tension between image and printed text. The screen prints are all hand-altered with paint or with handwritten or stenciled text. Sylvia Vorwagner’s work can be seen as three thematic explorations: Connected Appreciation, Change your Attitude and an “open” series which examines reoccurring themes and symbols. Connected Appreciation, as the title series suggests, considers our human and specifically earth bound inter-connectedness and serves as a call for us to re-value our approach to the world around us. In Change your Attitude, Sylvia probes events that occur on the same day but in different locations – with some locations being specific, such as Tokyo, and others being abstractly referred to, such as The Day Before Yesterday. In each location, Sylvia references how human greed and power have destroyed the world we live in. For Peter Eder and Ottilie Grossmayer, KunstHaus is their first exhibit in the United States. Sylvia Vorwagner’s work was included in LoveWorks at SemiPublic Gallery in February 2011. translators note: The artists’ statements included in this catalog were translated specifically with the intent of keeping each artist’s writing style as close to its original as possible. Heidi Zednik, Curator KunstHaus 2011-2012 SemiPublic Gallery & Abecedarian Gallery |