On March 23rd, 2022 KRINZINGER SCHOTTENFELD opens the exhibition ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE 2020-2021—a group exhibition of 14 national and international, emerging and already renowned contemporary artists. The exhibiting artists participated in the Krinzinger residency program in Petőmihályfa (HU), Kuberton (HR) and in Vienna (AUT), in 2020–2021 on the invitation of Dr. Ursula Krinzinger and Thomas Krinzinger. The exhibited works were created in the course of the respective stays of the participating artists and reflect the different local conditions—ecological, social, cultural or political—coupled with the personal experiences of the artists and their influence on the individual creative processes.
KRINZINGER SCHOTTENFELD (formerly known as Krinzinger Projekte) was founded in 2002 as a project space and extension of the Galerie Krinzinger. Since then, the space has been realising a very successful international program consisting primarily of thematic group exhibitions displaying fresh artistic positions. The artist-in-residence program is intended to offer national and international artists the opportunity to expand their networks and to produce and collect new impressions outside their usual working environment. Previous participants of the program have meanwhile become very successful representatives of important positions in the international art scene.
(* 1991 in Columbia, Missouri, USA ). He grew up between Nigeria and the US and now lives and works in New York City, USA. Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola was selected for the Anderson Ranch Art Center Residency in 2017, was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship in 2019, and was an artist in residence at Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna in 2021-2022. He has featured in exhibitions at the Pace Gallery, NY, Hauser and Wirth, NY, Night Gallery, CA, Carbon12, UAE, False Flag, NY and the Verbeke Foundation, Belgium as well as the Queens Museum, NY and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, GA, among others. Following his show at the Museum of Art and Design, NY in 2020, Akinbola mounted a significant solo exhibition in early 2021 at the Kohler Arts Center, WI, and MULTILATERAL is his first show with the Galerie Krinzinger.
Akinbola abstracts elements from the social and natural world in an attempt to mitigate the space between abstraction and representation. Akinbola takes multilateralism principle and applies it to the variety of materials and objects. The result is a visual discourse around the conversation of globalisation and an ever-converging world. His body of work engages conversations around global consumption and the commodification of culture.
Milijana Babić & Nada Žgank
(1974 Rijeka, Croatia and 1967 Ljubljana, Slovenia). Babić lives and works in Rijeka, Croatia. Her work is rooted in performative art practice, often developing in the direction of contextually specific, long-term actions in public space. The starting point of her work is her position as a woman and an artist, which she questions in her immediate surroundings. Her collaborator Nada Žgank is a photographer based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The exhibited work Till Death Do Us Apart critically reflects on the position of the artist who is not present on the art market and who, for the first time in her twenty-year-long artistic career, has to put the price on her work. It is based on a performative photograph taken in front of the property of the prominent Viennese gallerist Ursula Krinzinger in Istria, Croatia, where the residence program AiRKuberton takes place, celebrating the artist's virgin-like encounter with the art market. In this sense, the price of the artwork is to be seen as its integral part.
(* 1972 in Penang, Malaysia) lives and works in Vienna. He studied under the painter Christian Ludwig Attersee at the Vienna University of Applied Arts. His work was shown several times at Galerie Krinzinger and Krinzinger Scottenfeld. He participated in various solo and group exhibitions in Austria and abroad and in Institutions such as the Museum Krems, Stift Altenburg, NN Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Theater Odeon, Galerie Kunst & Handel, Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum.
The subtlety of the concept of classic ink paintings is not only based on the restriction to one colour, but also in the minimalist juxtaposition of contrasts. Order verses Chaos –Thean Chie Chan is bringing two contrary concepts into a simple form. The lines resemble order, splattered paint stands for chaos and coincidence. The amorphous forms can be understood as a metaphor for humanity. Thean Chie Chan is using classic ink paintings to resemble his version of the modern human. In our individualistic society humans are separated from each other, but there is this fine line that connects us.
(*1984 in Zottegem, Belgium) studied architecture at Sint-Lucas Ghent and fine arts at the Academie voor schone Kunsten in Antwerp and from 2011 at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, where she lives and works since then. Her painterly work has been shown in group and solo-exhibtions in Belgium, Austria, France, Germany and in Russia. Within her artistic work, Stefanie De Vos is creating interactions and cooperarions with other media as architecture, interior, landscape architecture and dance. Communicating patches of colours and graphical elements are combined to colourful, expressive compositions in works on canvas, paper, acrylic glass and as wall paintings. Her way of working is intuitive. A sense of freedom is reflected in vibrating, rhythmical paintings. Out of a summary of elements leads to chainlike dispositions with irregular rhythms and accents. The spaces which occur are landscapes with multiple three-dimensional connections, interruptions and orientation points.
At the Kuberton artist in residence, the boundaries between interior and exterior are blurred. The studio extends into the garden and the village. Nature has taken over a large part of the former structure of the village.
The dimensions of farms are difficult to access; interior and exterior are increasingly becoming each other's mirror image. Often, corner pieces of houses are missing. The open walls form a frame for observing the sky. It resembles the theory of architect Bernard Rudofsky who understood the free-standing walls as the origin of architecture and the antique gardens being integrated into the walls of the house. Architecture becomes frame-like, its elements are still present but the layers of material has in its decay undergone an reversion process. The materials that have broken off lie on top of each other like a broken puzzle. The lighter materials, such as ceramics, lose their connection with the structure first and thus end up at the bottom, followed by wood and finally stone. It's a delicate, scattered and fragile landscape. The reverse of an architectural construction, a process that in archaeology is called reverse stratigraphy.
The paintings are constructed in a similar way; transparent pigments in the background, pasty white as highlights in the last layer. The fleeting and light layers make the connection with the primer. The highlights hooks into the transparent 'pool'. The transparency in the works is inspired by a number of works based on colours of the environment reflected on the blue pool, an absorption basin for all the sound and colour of the surrounding. Unspoilt nature is not silent.
A group of sculptures made on-site. Found materials that are assembled as a playful interpretation of the 'reverse stratigraphy' principle.
(*1984 in Ilmenau, Germany) lives and works in Vienna. Matthias Franz graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2019, where he was a student of Daniel Richter. Franz's work can be found in the Rachofsky collection, Dallas, TX (US); De Heus-Zomer Collection, Barneveld (NL); THE EKARD COLLECTION; The Franks-Suss Collection, London (UK); Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas TX (US); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); The Roberts Institute of Art (RIA), London (UK) and numerous private collections.
Throughout his early career, Franz has developed a captivating style of organic representation where viewpoints in his paintings are refracted, obscured, and through this brought closer to life. Directly confronting the complexity of contemporary existence, he approaches the medium of painting as a venture in witnessing and recording his time. In his paintings, muted earth tones are contrasted with shadowy outlines and full primary hues that comprise invented architectural spaces or uncanny perspectives. The pulling and pushing tension within his brushstrokes captures the sensation of heavy, enlarged forms giving way to more delicate arrangements, infused with the imbalanced weight and proportions one would find in a dream.
Franz is careful to distance the viewer's perspective from the interior of his paintings. He describes this process as 'clinging to the inherent depth and secret of things.' Buried within his images the viewer searches for the face of a figure or the contours of the skyline. Amongst the seemingly unconnected locations pictured throughout his oeuvre he depicts the environment of the academy, onstage performances, and beds full of dreaming bodies. Throughout these scenes, the motif of collective longing is projected into a broader social context, as are suggestions of detachment, inaction, and rebelliousness. The artist's early influences include American painters such as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, while he embraces the expressive grandeur inherited from his continental European predecessors and contemporaries, German painters such as Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, and Daniel Richter.
(*1986 in Székesfehérvár, Hungary) lives and works in Budapest. Kitti Gosztola graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2012 at Painting Department where she is currently pursuing her DLA studies.
As an artist, Kitti Gosztola is concerned primarily with the politics of the natural sciences, but in her compositions, the social and sensual aspects of art are not mutually exclusive. Her mediatically diverse practice ranges from experimenting with material features through archival research to socio-politically focused collaborations. In recent years, her works have been on exhibit at an array of institutions, including the Art Encounters Biennale in Timișoara, MSUB in Belgrade, the Archabbey of Pannonhalma, the King St. Stephen Museum in Székesfehérvár, the Trafó Gallery and the Ludwig Museum—Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, the first and second editions of the OFF-Biennale Budapest and Kisterem Gallery, also in Budapest. She has also been awarded the Smohay Prize and the Klára Herczeg Prize.
Mythosis (2020): In some of my works, I deal with how plants and animals are categorised as 'native' or 'invasive' and how these categories are often re-assessed due to unforeseen consequences. The swan, as a symbol of classical beauty, has been introduced to certain areas merely out of aesthetic considerations. As it is known, the Trojan War was caused by the beauty of Helen, hatched from the egg Leda laid having been impregnated by Zeus in the form of a swan. Less well known is a certain method that is used to prevent the 'overpopulation' of swans by making hatching impossible. Removing the eggs from the nest would only force the swans to lay eggs again, so the employees of national parks leave the eggs in the nest but paint them over with airtight varnish that prevents them from developing. The fertility rite of egg painting is thus transformed into a population control process. In Mythosis (using an egg shell obtained from a nature conservation institute), I experiment with the cultural-historical and material aspects of this method, the possibilities of the porous surface and the shiny lacquer.
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Right tree right place (2013-): The intricate ink drawings of the Right Tree Right Place series depict trees mutilated by the logic of urban infrastructure—sometimes out of safety standards, sometimes out of mere convenience. In a sense, this is a grotesque middle ground gardening between the English garden which celebrates 'untamed' nature and the OCD geometries of the classical French garden. Nevertheless, the insensitive and often disproportionately large-scale mutilation of canopies growing into electrical wiring compartments is not only an aesthetic issue, but almost always leads to the slow death of the tree. The individual frames are made of wood identical with the specific tree they frame and carry a small brass plaque with the Latin taxonomy, thus representing both the species and the unique specimen.
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Methanoia (2018-2021): According to the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, in the Delphi oracle, it was methane gas shooting from a ground fissure that helped the Pythia—seated in her three-legged chair, the tripus—achieve a state of enlightenment. Today, it seems nearly certain that the melting of the permafrost significantly increases the level of methane in the atmosphere. Recently, many gigantic craters were discovered in the Siberian tundra that likely came into being when the methane layer got loose under the frozen surface and exploded.
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Study for the Room at the Top (2021): Room at the Top examines the relationship between the column as a cultural-civilisational concept and the stratigraphic column, used to depict the layers of the Earth's crust. As we know, the pillar-saints—Saint Simeon Stylites and his followers—lived on the top of a column, provided with food via a rope or a ladder, and sometimes preached to those who gathered below. Today, we often hear about a new asceticism, eco-religion, Saint Greta Thunberg. But while pillar-saints were not tormented by doubt as to whether they would get closer to salvation, today no one knows if the sacrifice would be of use.
The work recalls these pillars, but its shape and surface also evokes the cylindrical core samples drawn from the depths of the Earth—revealing millions of years of geological strata—and their formalised counterparts: stratigraphic columns. On these stratigraphic columns, familiar from high school textbooks, the layers are indicated by standardised geometric patterns. Here, the patterns follow the history of Earth from bottom to top in geochronological order: granite, slate, limestone, and—beneath the capital—loess.
What should be at the top, though? The concept of the Anthropocene, the human-made era of Earth's history is based on seemingly irreversible and distinctly human effects (global warming, nuclear pollution, deep-sea crystallisation of plastic). But while Anthropocene has become a central term in humanities and arts, geologists are much more wary of accepting such a short time as a new era. Thus, here the top of the pillar is like an archaeological supplement: its plain, neutral surface turns the rest, the past into a fragment, accentuating the human-made nature of 'natural' categories. At the same time, it creates room for the new ascetics to fulfil the history of Earth.
(1994, Vienna) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, received Erasmus scholarship and completed his bachelor studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. After his studies in The Netherlands he stayed at the residency program at Krinzinger Projekte from early 2020 on. The works that have emerged from this period; a period in which the world circulated from lockdown to lockdown and that was determined by uncertainty, are dealing with the concept of failure, the nothingness and doing nothing. During his stay he used both the studio and the exhibition space as a sort of playground for his practice. At nights or during the build down of exhibitions in Krinzinger Projekte he often overtook the space, and created 'solo exhibitions for solo audience'. He set up his installations and sculptural works without telling anyone about it and removed them again, being the only one who had seen them.
Jakob's work centres around a playful tension between the common and minor interventions which create an almost uncanny atmosphere. Treating every object and material he uses or showcases equally, he changes purpose and meaning just by the suggestion.
(*1988 in Kosice, Slovakia) lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. Gábor Kristóf studied painting and intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts between 2008 and 2014, and at Chelsea College of Art and Design, UAL London in 2011. In 2018 he started his DLA research with a working title Form-making utopia / utopia-carrying forms at HUFA, Budapest. Kristóf is a board member of the Studio of Young Artists Association, founding member of the artist group Les Faux-Fauves and initiator of many collective projects. He was nominated for the Esterházy Art Award in 2019 and 2017 and for the ESSL Art Award CEE in 2013. In 2015, 2016 and 2017 he was one of the laureates of the Derkovits Prize for young emerging artists in Hungary. With the support of Visegrad Fund and Futura Prague he was in residency at Art in General, Brooklyn, NY in 2017 and in 2016 at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.
'Standardisation is the key factor for the global network of industries to match the requirements in everyday mass production of goods. The natural development of technologies since the industrial revolution is generally oriented to efficiency and thus just the most current solutions stay viable. This phenomena on the other hand lead to highly determined world picturings, visions for the present and future. In my artistic work I place my position on the border of the above mentioned realm and the more traditional forms of arts. Most of my series is based on the examination of the outdated of unefficient potentials of certain industrial technologies such as offset printing, die-cutting, colour forecasting or powder coating. Through the experimental work in the industrial field I am aiming to initiate mutation or just simply to point at more organic potentials inherent in these usually untouchable processes and this way to found also new opportunities and concepts for creation.'
—Gábor Kristóf
(*1998 in Budapes, Hungary). Lázár obtained a degree in Photography in 2020, and gained membership in the Studio of Young Photographers the same year, she is currently a master's student in Media Design at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. In her practice she is often intrigued by people's ambivalent relation to reality, and the absurdity and incalculability of existence. Her works join phenomena revealing connections and meanings that go beyond the individual elements associated. For her, the creative work often means setting up situations that enable reflections and interactions in which the role of the recipient turns into that of a participant without their intention or knowing. She wants to blur the line between roles and broaden the common conception of the artistic process, even for herself.
Give Me Your Attention 'Give me your attention and you will soon perceive that I say nothing to which you can object':
'Eszter Lazar's object problematises the relationship between the viewer and the artwork, the act of reception itself, through the theme of the gaze. The gaze, which in the work of 20th century authors such as Sartre or Lacan is primarily a determining factor of intersubjective relations, insofar as these authors speak of the subject's vulnerability to the gaze of the Other. The object contextualises this relation in the relationship between the work and the spectator, identifying the gaze with understanding, decoding the work revealing its secrets.
Eszter Lazar's object attempts to resist the traditional model of reception that leads from looking to understanding and to stake the gaze on mere watching. This is also the aim of the work's clean design and reduced expression: the transparency of the plexiglas form means that it is barely separated from the surrounding space and does not seek to transcend itself on the level of meaning. The object does not want to convey a message, it does not speak a common language with its viewer, it does not desire to be understood, it functions as a thin membrane stretched and compressed between nothing and something, which perceives the gaze but does not want to transfer it to the register of interpretation. Thus Eszter Lazar's object does not offer itself to the viewer's gaze, its resistance directs the interpretative attitude of the gaze, searching for meanings, back to the viewer.'—Zsofia Mate, aesthete)
Eternal Desire (object from the Eternal Desire series): '
'I examine longing, or in other words, 'yearning' as the chief motivational device of the human psyche in my work. When one is longing for something or someone, one is excited due to the pleasure or thought that is related to that object or person, and is willing to take steps to achieve one's goal. As long as something exists in the form of desire, the possibility of perfection exists with it—this is what we call idealisation. I focus on the coexistence and the relationship between longing and idealisation with my objects. The reason one yearns for something is because one idealises, and one idealises so that one can yearn. The moment one's desires come true and are materialised, this overlapping process ceases to exist and the desire becomes a self-extinguishing act— summoning the impossibility of satisfaction.'
—Esther Lazar
(*1992 in Hellmonsödt, Austria) lives and works in Vienna. Ojo studied sculpture and spatial strategies with Monica Bonvicini and Stefanie Seibold at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and graduated in 2020 with a project supervised by Iman Issa. In 2020 Ojo was awarded with the Kunsthalle Wien Prize.
'Using sculptural, analog-reproducing and digital media, she succeeds in linking the practice of creating Afro hairstyles, which is associated with knowledge, collective memory, rituals and intimate processes, with general questions of identity and representation—from the message as a sign of protest to an established code of belonging,' so the jury statement about the work of the award–winning artist.
(* 1986, Slovenia) Miran Šabić (b. 1986, Slovenia) is a Croatian visual artist. He has a PhD in Visual Arts for his work Archiving Memory at the Boundary of Life and Death. Through figurative drawing, printmaking, painting and art installation he is researching contemporary aspects of personal memory. Assuming that the person recapitulates life at point of death, Šabić is presenting the memories that one would perceive as most important in their lives. Also, he is interested in whether there is a universal model of the most important memories that can be applied to every person, and how to materialise those memories through art.
Instead of providing a literal representation of the narrated moment, or giving an illustration of a personal event, Šabić tells the story through objects used or seen in a particular situation. In that way it is up to the spectator to relate to the story and to use their own imagination to visualise the story. Without the presence of the spectator, who uses their recollections and imagination to imagine the narrated event, Šabić's work cannot be completed. Miran Šabić is Assistant professor, and Vice dean for student affairs at Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He participated in many individual and group exhibitions from the USA to South Korea and won several awards for his work.
'In my works I often question the different aspects of human memory and the way it is connected to other people, things, or places. While I was in residency in Kuberton I was intrigued by the abandoned village and the history of it. I was looking at the abandoned massive buildings that were once prosperous farms, the neglected small church/chapel in the middle of the village, and the well in front of it. Once this place flourished with life, and now it is mostly forgotten. In my work I wanted to capture the aura of that place and its history. Each motive that I have chosen has a different texture around it so I decided to incorporate textures in my painting. In quite a literal sense.'
—Miran Šabić
(*1986 in Merano, Italy) lives and works in Vienna. From 2007 to 2014, he studied with Professor Erwin Wurm and Guest Professor Martin Walde at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He has exhibited in Bergen (NO), Innsbruck, Lisbon (PO), Luxembourg (LU), Mals (IT) and Vienna.
'During my stay in Petömihalyfa, I created the sculpture _Self-portrait as a child #5. _My plan was to let myself be taken in by the situation in Petömihalyfa in an unbiased way, to see what materials I encounter and how I will deal with the materials through the impressions on site. Thus, I noticed the cylindrical concrete block on the site and recognised in its shape the relationship with somersaulting, one of the activities I diligently pursued on site in the beginning. I decided to investigate how to a) carve a human body out of a cylinder b) fit a human body into a cylinder.
In the sculpture series Self-portrait as a child, I deal with repetitive activities from childhood, a time in which one is confronted with having to subordinate oneself to the circumstances, whereby structures are learned and internalised. This restriction of freedoms and import of constraints is reflected in the sculptures of this series in their physical clumsiness, as well as in their mental, through the representation of a repetitive activity and / or restricted posture. As a result, the game becomes only a distant hint of a free lust for life, but rather an indication of the mutilated freedom.'
—(Leander Schönweger)
(*1985 in Vukovar, Croatia) graduated 2009 and finished Ph.D. 2016 from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb.
'I'm interested in researching how humans are surrounded and what is around them (what are the procedures and what are consequences). I'm also interested in un-visible elements that are in those surrounding (what kind of role is played in making visual communication possible). In many of my artworks I am working in drawing with ink, collages, printmaking techniques with installation and performance.'
—Ana Sladetić
(*1983 in Herdecke, Germany) lives and works in Vienna. Studied sculpture and media art at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel from 2006 to 2009, sculpture and multimedia with Erwin Wurm and others at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 2009 to 2013 (diploma 2013 with Martin Walde).
'Angestachelt: A wooden chair is covered with thorns. The thorns were collected from Croatian wild rose bushes and then applied to the surface of the chair.
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Der Ausflug: A mobilé hangs over a square dining table with two wooden chairs on which exhibition visitors can sit. Golden-eyed brakes hang from the mobile and slowly circle the table—above the heads of the visitors. The brakes are set in motion by a fan in the room. The golden-eyed gadflies come from Croatia, they were my studio mates during the residency.__
Von Fall zu Fall: I carry a stack of plates, cups and bowls in my arms while standing smiling in an empty white room. At first I stand very still, but as time goes by it becomes harder and harder to hold the arm with the dishes still. The arm begins to tremble and a soft clinking sound is heard. Finally, I can no longer hold my arm horizontally, the harness crashes to the floor and breaks. A looped beamer projection shows me again and again in the act of balancing the dishes: the same clothes, the same room, but always a new pile of dishes falling to the floor.'
—Angelika Wischermann
Press release courtesy Krinzinger Schottenfeld.
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