When KUNSTRAUM
INNSBRUCK opened with its first exhibition in the summer of 1996 - ZEITSCHNITT 96:
Contemporary Art from Austria, curated by Ulli Lindmayr - the basic planning work for the
gallery's future programme had already been largely completed, with curators from five
countries of Europe invited to focus on the current art scene in their respective cultural
environments. The thinking behind this strategy of a quick succession of group exhibitions
was to present a kaleidoscope of international contemporary art in all its diversity so as
to counteract the alarming local tendency to shy away from current artistic developments
and thus permit Innsbruck to again play a more prominent role in the reception of
international contemporary art.
For ZEITSCHNITT 96: Contemporary Art from Austria, Ulli Lindmayr selected a total of
twelve artists or groups of artists, namely Gottfried Feldner, Mario
Gander, the Odradek brothers, Günter Gstrein, Eudokia Gundolf, Walter Gundolf, Stefan Gyurko, Andreas
Holzknecht, Annelies Oberdanner, Klaus Pobitzer, Isa Rosenberger and Clemens Stecher. In
the spring of 1997, Bernard Jordan and Marcel Lubac of Paris curated
corps/décor with the
works of six artists who live mainly in France: Erik Corne, Christoph
Cuzin, Bertrand Gadenne, Jackie Kayser, Bernard Lallemand and François
Maurige. This was followed in the
early summer of the same year by tussen de massen, an exhibition curated by Lex ter Brak
from Middelburg, the Netherlands, with the works of the following eight
artists: Vobe de
Gruyter, Rineke Dijkstra, Fransje Killaars, Renée Kool, Ronald Ophuis, Keiko
Sato, Wouter
van Riessen and Albert van Westing. The series continued in the summer of 1998 with an
exhibition of New Art from Britain - organised in co-operation with the Yorkshire
Sculpture Park and curated by Peter Murray - featuring works by Christine
Borland, Willie
Doherty, Ceal Floyer, Laura Ford, John Frankland, Anya Gallaccio, Bethan
Huys, KIT, Tania Kovats, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker, Emma
Rushton, Hermione Wiltshire, Craig Wood and
Catherine Yass.
El punto ciego, Spanish Art of the 90`s - the fifth exhibition in the ZEITSCHNITT series
and the subject of this publication - demonstrates once more the relevance of the strategy
of lending structure to the diversity of today's international artistic positions on the
basis of the artists' origins, the cultural environments and everyday worlds in which they
grew up and/or chose to live and work in, if only for a limited period of time, and shows
that this approach is just as effective as selecting a general theme or specific
technique.
The eleven artists presented in the exhibition by José Luis Brea are international
artists: Ana Laura Alaez, Pep Agut, Txomin Badiola, Jordi
Colomer, Salomé Cuesta, Dora
Garcia, Pello Irazu, José Maldonado, Itziar Okariz, Montserat Soto and Eulalia
Valldosera. As individuals and in their works they are all mobile - in both the physical
and the virtual worlds - and indeed many of them live abroad all or part of the time and
they are all in personal and professional contact with artists all over the
world. The
Spanish artists demonstrate an almost natural facility in their use of an international
formal language that does justice to the enhanced reading abilities of their own and
younger generations, with their familiarity with digital, virtual audio and video
worlds,
involving faster rates of change and correspondingly new aesthetic
features.
At the same time the artists build on their original cultural identity as a product of the
process of growing up, of learning and developing in a specific cultural environment with
its geopolitical and historical specificities.
Spanish history and culture are the product of the diverse contributions made by numerous
civilisations, by the Greeks, Romans, Goths, Vandals and Moors, and also - with their
relative influence varying over the centuries - by different religions, by
Jewry,
Christianity and Islam. They are also the product of political links past and present and
mutual cultural influence with Austria and Central Europe on the one hand and with Central
and South America on the other, and of a topography and climate that embrace the littoral
regions and a vast hinterland at the same time. It can be assumed that this complex
cultural framework and a consequent involvement with new ideas arriving from more than the
western world formed the basis for the traditional propensity for the avant-garde that
Spanish artists have revealed and promoted over and over again in the course of time. Thus
Velázquez and the Spanish baroque occupy a very prominent position in the European
history of art; Goya is considered a visionary precursor of modern art, and Picasso, Juan
Gris and the surrealists around Miró and Buńuel have more than left their mark on art in
the 20th century.
With innovative technologies and new media now providing almost unrestricted access to
information at the global level, artists too are making use of these powerful
communications tools and have developed a formal language, a vocabulary that guarantees a
degree of readability worldwide and constitutes a form of communication that transcends
the limits of national languages or semiotics that are restricted to individual cultural
communities. For their work, the artists derive their referential systems in terms of form
and content not only from the processes of self-observation and
self-depiction, from their
roles as members and contemporary observers of the society in which they live, from the
history of art and culture and historical developments that form the basis of a specific
social condition and the general state of society, but also and above all through their
ongoing dialogue with one another and the referential use of others' artistic ideas in
their own works at a level that goes beyond all geographical or cultural
borders.
El punto ciego, Spanish Art of the 90`s is an exhibition that speaks an international
language and addresses key issues of our time and society. In this context the artists
derive their calling and competence from the cultural complexity of their origins and the
critical tradition discussed by José Luis Brea in his essay.
A debt of thanks is owed to the artists for their interest in the exhibition and their
active involvement in the preparations. We are also grateful to the owners of the
works,
the galleries, the authors, and the various local, regional and national authorities who
have supported the exhibition, the Spanish Embassy, and all our private sponsors and
especially our main sponsor Tiroler Sparkasse Bank AG, which has been involved in such
non-profit activities ever since it was founded 176 years ago. Today the bank promotes a
variety of social and cultural projects and events and has made support for contemporary
art one of its social functions. Finally, a special word of thanks must go to José Luis
Brea for his highly convincing concept for the exhibition and the fine spirit of
co-operation enjoyed at every stage in its development and
implementation, as well as to
Soledad Lorenzo for her invaluable suggestions and assistance from the very start. |
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| Elisabeth
Thoman-Oberhofer |
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