Bernhard Frue
:
Fair and Lovely
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After remodeling an old fire station and turning it into an exhibition space for contemporary art, Michael Kienzer invited artists to create temporary installations that would last half a year and would also be visible from the outside through a large window. He thus transformed the entire building into a sculpture in public space. Michael Kienzer’s long-term project of bringing contemporary art to a rural community continues with the thirteenth exhibition curated by him in the Kunstraum Weikendorf. Thanks to the succession of exhibitions that have been featured in the art space since 2007, we can compare and contrast each new artwork with previous artistic positions shown there.
The two current artists, Christina Zurfluh and Bernhard Frue, are very different in terms of preferred media. However, working in a space together for the first time meant they had to meet somewhere in the middle – to treat each other fair and lovely in regard to content, form, and practical realization.Christina Zurfluh’s preferred medium is painting. She stays within its limits, but also pushes them, going so far as to combine painting with sculpture to create installations. Her paintings are usually large in scale and feature intense colors. They are also highly complex, both structurally and technically. But most of all, her painting methods convey an aesthetic joy in working with colors. On the other hand, Bernhard Frue, like many artists of his generation, feels at home in a wide range of different media that he employs to involve viewers in his observations of social behavior. In his artistic investigations, he often uses references that are seldom pleasant and are even sometimes disturbing. He frequently integrates his own biography as a starting point for his conceptual works.
For this exhibition, the art space was divided into two color fields. The division between these two fields functions as a central artistic category in which one thing always opposes the other. Color is employed as a plastic form, while an object – a drawing floating in space – which is characterized by the different styles of the two artists, has been inserted as a means of joining the separate color fields, thereby creating a tension between sculpture and ground. This sculpture inhabits the color space like a joint signature. It incorporates an iron object that Bernhard Frue used previously as a handrail in his exhibition in the staircase of the Vienna Secession. Zurfluh then wrapped a twisted massive iron bar around Frue’s form. For this purpose, she worked with a metal worker from Vienna to create the iron bar on-site. Short texts were also inscribed on the handrail, and then hidden under a bandage-like wrapping made of cloth. These written and material fragments of dreams thus introduce stories into the otherwise empty space. On the handrail are also physical traces (handprints) of the visitors from Bernhard Frue’s exhibition in the Vienna Secession. The presence of these traces merges with the presence of visitors today in the Kunstraum Weikendorf.
(Bärbl Zechner)
Images (3)
