Stretch Sculpture
Hans Kupelwieser
Hans Kupelwieser is one of the best-known representatives
of post-media sculpture in Austria. His conceptual works reflect
the media and concentrate on the transformation process from
an object to an image and vice versa, from plasticity poured
onto a surface to re-materialisation into a three-dimensional
form. This is about perception oscillating between two and
three-dimensionality. The artist's sculptures are closely
linked to photography, nay, sculpture and photography are
mutually conditional, and the core question is how the objects
occur to our senses.
A fundamental element of this work is the photogram, a mediatised
form of the extremely plastic technique of imprinting. Hans
Kupelwieser uses the simplest everyday objects for his pictorial
creations. Food - such as boiled spaghetti, rice, potatoes
- or pieces of furniture leave behind their traces on the
light-sensitive substrate of the photo paper.
dropped, 2000
Photogramm-Photo (Detail) 60 x 84 cm
The photographic dialectics of presence and absence, positive
and negative, light and darkness are the focus of attention
in the artistic work of Hans Kupelwieser which unites photographic,
sculptural and conceptual elements.
Ever since the photos of Bernd and Hilla Becher were awarded
the sculpture prize at the Venice Biennial in 1993 - at the
latest -, it is no longer the depicted reality, but photography
as a real construct that matters. In Venice, it was not the
sculptural quality of the depicted objects that earned the
award, but the photographic production that gives reality
a body and gives appearance actuality. Even more than photography,
the photogram refers to the material quality of the substrate
upon which the objects appear. Sometimes, Kupelwieser cuts
out the visual traces of the things - for instance the spaghettograms
- and then lets them grow into space three-dimensionally:
the reality in the photo makes the things real.
Spaghettogramme (spaghettograms), 2004
Steel; Installation view (detail)
Positive and negative, fact and fiction also play a role
in the pneumatic sculptures Hans Kupelwieser has been working
on since the early 1990s. The Gonflables are made by welding
thin aluminium sheets together and then filling them with
air.
bubble in the corner, 2004
inflated aluminum, 600 x 50 x 240 cm
Installation in the court of Neue Galerie Graz
The oversized bubble that leans against the wall of the staircase
in the Kunsthaus Meran is first absorbed by the building two-dimensionally
in the form of aluminium sheets and then expands and unfolds
on site as a solid three-dimensional object. The pneumatic
principle turns out to be an interface between surface and
space, but - unlike with a balloon - the process is irreversible:
once the material has taken on its plasticity, the sensuality
of tactility persists, and the complex event entrenches itself
behind the manifest corporeality; the idea of inflatability
is materialised in the appearance that wishes to be penetrated:
"Aesthetic perception is awareness for what happens to its
objects", writes Martin Seel - not in the sense of a physical
manipulation, but as a visualisation of the perceptive process.
(Extract from the catalogue introduction
by Marion Piffer Damiani)
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