Opening: Monday, 25 February, 7 p.m.
Introductory talk: Ruth Horak
Workshop talk with Markus Guschelbauer: Wednesday, 20 March, 7 p.m.
sponsored by: BMUKK; MA7-Kultur; Cyberlab, Leutner Bildwerkstatt GmbH, Vienna
Since 2010 one of the eight annual exhibitions which the FOTOGALERIE WIEN puts on is a solo show dedicated to a young, up-coming artist. The SOLO series serves as a platform and springboard for artists at the beginning of their career who already have an extensive amount of work available to present to a wider public. The aim is to achieve a lasting presence for the artists selected by making contacts with cooperation partners and facilitating touring shows. For SOLO III we have invited the Austrian artist Markus Guschelbauer.
Markus Guschelbauer (*1974 in Friesach/AT, lives and works in Vienna) studied photography and visual arts under Gabriele Rothemann at the Vienna University of Applied Arts from 2003 to 2009. His work is concerned with the multi-layered relationship of nature and culture. In his installative landscape photography he works with, and significantly alters, nature, thus engaging with definitions of landscape. He does this using everyday materials which are, on the surface, foreign to the art world – like sheets of plastic or fabrics used for clothing.
These he stretches in front of the camera, distributes them in the landscape or builds them into ephemeral architectures. This allows manifold associations ranging from church space to bio-tech lab. In his more recent works he focuses on the fabrics that he uses in his photographs in their own right. He examines their material nature and their textures, and updates the art historical term, drapery (folds), taken from Gothic panel paintings, in order to explore its implications across different media: fabrics behind museum glass refer to photographs and, equally to Western portrait painting. Artfully folded fabrics interrogate the definition of sculpture and bring the two-dimensions of the early installation works back to three dimensions. In his exhibition at the FOTOGALERIE WIEN Markus Guschelbauer attempts to use photography as a starting point from which to oscillate between the areas of landscape and architecture, portrait painting and fashion so as to elicit new aspects from them.
Petra Noll