Gilbert Bretterbauer and Franz Graf
Galerie Krobath Wimmer, Vienna, Austria
As you enter Galerie Krobath Wimmer the situation seems bewildering: something has just happened here, but from the look of things the visitor has arrived too late. Maybe a party, perhaps an exhibition? All that is left is to puzzle over the leftovers.
The small room is brightly lit, as if it’s in the middle of being cleaned up. On the floor a loose white drop cloth is covered with traces of a previous social event - red wine stains, shoe prints, cigarette ash. The walls are white and empty except for two disks the size of LPs, one painted with radiating crayon colours, the other with black and grey tones.
Leaning against a wall in a corner is a black and white drawing of a face crossed with spiral shaped bars. Its casual position suggests that it has either been forgotten, or will soon be cleared away. Next to it lies a colourful patchwork blanket; a bright counterpoint to the rest of the room’s furnishings. Six primed grey pipes and metal bars hang from improvised cords on the ceiling. Two of them are spiral-shaped, while another pair are painted with colourful spirals. As an additional environmental element, electronic sound emits from a black mini-stereo system, placed beneath a window.
This collaborative exhibition by Franz Graf and Gilbert Bretterbauer - both forty-something Viennese artists - gathers together several components whose transitory effect develops through the precise arrangement of details, whilst alluding to something either absent or past. Graf’s hanging ceiling pipes recall the light pipes of his former exhibition partner, installation artist Brigitte Kowanz, (though not perpetuating her work’s industrial surface precision). Bretterbauer’s floor cloth, with its stains and other evidence of usage, functions like a recording medium, reporting traces of movements and moments past.
The party is over, that much is clear. Now it’s all about testing the communication value of artistic space. This is especially relevant in the context of Helga Krobath and Barbara Wimmer’s gallery, a result of Vienna’s rejuvenated art scene, which has spawned nine new galleries in the last two years. Appropriately the artists’ ‘soundtrack’ evokes a fragile balance, a breathless sense of upheaval. Bretterbauer’s harsh bass-guitar riffs and Graf’s nervous, rasping electronic melody lines are accompanied by a muffled female voice on an answering machine, infinitely repeating itself. Together they create the uneasy sensation of having received an urgent request.
The exhibition re-examines the tradition of panel painting and the arrangement of colour, if only to banish them to the edge of the field of vision. The CD recordings and evocative floor cloth represent an alternative exploration. The fragile, haphazard ease of this installation contradicts a typically contemporary Viennese approach to decoration and ornament (found, for example, in the work of artists like Heimo Zobernig or Gerwald Rockenschaub). Graf and Bretterbauer understand those minimalist, orderly positions only too well, intentionally bringing into play a different mode, which has a similar material economy yet allows more fluid conditions.
Translated by Dominic Eichler
Patricia Grzonka
