Introduction

Group Show curated by Julie Ryan

Opening: Thursday, 23rd April, 7-9 p.m.
Duration: 24.04. - 23.06.2009

Participating artists:

Kevin Baker, Josef Bauer, Johann Fruhmann, Michael Huey, Laurent Montaron, Ute Müller, Jonathan Quinn, Jef Scharf, Ursula Schneider,Tamuna Sirbiladze, Rita Vitorelli, Herwig Weiser, Rachel Wilberforce

The Red Thread

The Red Thread was conceived as a flexible exhibition format, and has previously been shown in NYC at the Educational Alliance and a private Gallery in Seattle, WA. Originally The Red Thread served as a connective concept that surveyed various ‘threads’ in the international Vienna art scene: In its current incarnation at Dana Charkasi Galerie The Red Thread again serves as a conduit to the current Vienna art scene while also reaching to the gallery’s own past with the inclusion of Joseph Bauer and Johann Fruhmann, who showed at ‘Galerie im Griechenbeisl’ that was run by Dana Charkasi’s aunt Christa Hauer in the same building the 1960s.

Now, by reflecting to a historical past of the space, The Red Thread continues the link to contemporary artists working in Vienna today as well as certain theoretical and aesthetic threads that expand the breadth of the show and serve to define this space in Vienna as an engaging gallery for contemporary artists. both in Vienna and internationally.

In doing this, artists like Rachel Wilberforce, a London and France based artist, exhibits photographs of interiors culled from her own family archives. Wilberforce works with ideas of re-staging and reworking personal histories into modern variations. The thread connects her to long time Vienna based artist Michael Huey, who also works with family and found images to generate his photos and, for the first time, in a short film. This film is a reworking of his grandfather’s slight of hand for the camera. Both artists seek minute details and juxtapositions in archival imagery.

Rita Vitorelli paints interior and exterior large scale works that simultaneously appear finished and undone, abstract and representational. Based on photos of urban detritus and interior remnants, the fragmented paintings serve as unsentimental visions of a disembodied original. Herwig Weiser includes a video and several photos stills from the film. These stunningly abstract stills of what appear to be growing in a test vial are actually chemical implosions. not expanding but reducing. His highly technological works are abstractly engaging and can be encountered on various levels, like the work of Vitorelli.

Johann Fruhmann, who used to have strong ties to the gallery, was a prolific artist that made work both attached and detached from his time. His investigations into abstraction and non-objective painting frequently also carry strong universal references to shape and body and architecture. Ute Müller, a young Viennese painter, also works with abstract painting that attempts to escape sentimentality. By extracting segments of architecture and industry she renders them useless and at the same time reinvigorated by recontextualising them in her dramatic blackish-white egg tempura paintings.

Jonathan Quinn, a Vienna based artist, is well known for his own slight-of-hand minimal thread installations. Here Quinn has created a unique lighting sculpture for the courtyard along with a print representing two chairs — as an edition of one. Tamuna Sirbiladze, a Georgian artist living in Vienna, contributes two of her unrepentant paintings to the show. The explosive quality of these works may seem counterintuitive to the restraint of Quinn at first, until one feels the diabolical reach the audience takes in viewing them and the utter forthrightness of the artists’ approach.

Laurent Monteron hit in the dead of winter, and I was struck not only by the beauty of the installation but also by the elaborateness of its conception. Monteron, a French artist, captured the quintessential elaboration of Vienna. A subtle yet articulate outlay of the interior winter.

The Swiss born New York artist Ursula Schneider offers up a single bird, meticulously produced to the artists observational eye. Like Monteron, there is an elaborate progression which turns out to be a progression towards an iridescent caste form seductively grasping the wall. Kevin Baker is a young NYC artist whose small and detailed painting of flowers are overlaid on the same plastic cloth one might use to cover a picnic table. He takes archived decorative patterns, and paints them into a completely different visual existence. By transforming age old patterns into newly imagined contemporary visions Baker, like Schneider, hovers on the boarder of kitsch iconography, but a deep concern with the art and nature of this iconography elevates the work beyond its visage and material.

Josef Bauer showed these pieces in Christa Hauer’s gallery in the 1960s. I was struck by their timelessness, the sculpture could have been made yesterday. The letters propped up on tall stilts are a beacon of modernity. And a test of time. It is the red thread. It is the consummate surviving link and another thread that conjoins the exhibition.

Jef Scharf (aka Wolfy) created his artwork as an edition of 50 silkscreen prints that promote the exhibition. These poster artworks are a clever and sophisticated twist on The Red Thread and embody the public/private aspect of the show.

Julie Ryan

Exhibitions

• Apr ’09 - The Red Thread

Biography

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