Just like last year, our first exhibition after the summer is dedicated to Michael Kienzer. After his very productive months in New York, made possible through an ISCP grant, we wanted to give the artist an opportunity right away to present the result. In our summer exhibition we already showed two works by Kienzer, one of them Untitled (2011), a wall piece developed in New York. It consists of five bicycle tyres of the same size, with aluminium profiles inserted like diameters, arranged horizontally on the wall, that invisibly grow longer from tyre to tyre, thus gradually transforming these from a circle into an extreme ellipse. The second work, 20x93 (2010), was created, before the artist left Vienna last autumn, for the exhibition originalfunktional, organised by the Vienna Art Foundation, and curated by Stefan Bidner. It was specifically made to serve as a bench to sit on and consists of various layers of materials such as wood-fibre boards, plasterboard, polystyrene, acrylic glass, rubber, and linoleum, coming in different colours and sizes. For the exhibition Shining in Bad Gastein, Kienzer has just created an installation (29.08. to 18.09.11) around the disused machines at the old hydroelectric power station. Aluminium profiles and rubber straps combine with the turbines (built in 1914) to form a huge sculpture. These are just three works bearing testimony to Kienzer's conceptual precision, his highly economic use of materials and artistic gesture, the apparent lightness of his works, and the vastness of the room they open up for associations. His latest sculptures, also to be shown at our exhibition, Kienzer is currently working on.

Further texts on the artist, by Christophe Domino, Peter Pakesch et al., are to be found on our homepage, as are images, among others, of the sculptures mentioned.

Michael Kienzer