HEIMO ZOBERNIG (Viena, 1958)
From April 8 to May 14, 2010

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the opening of the first art gallery in Seville, the Galería de Juana de Aizpuru has prepared an outstanding schedule of exhibitions to celebrate the event and salute an important group of artists who have accompanied her over the years. All of them have been marked by an extraordinary effort at raising contemporary creation and the most advanced languages of aesthetics to a position that had been denied them for so many years. With this aim amply achieved, and agents from all over the art world acclaiming her as one of the grand dames of modern Spanish art, a celebration starts today that will go on all year long. The program includes magnificent exhibitions by some of the greatest artists represented by the gallery: the ones who put Spanish art onto the international stage and turned the gallery into a point of reference in recent art history.

The celebration kicks off with a sample of the work by Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig 2006-2010 (1958, Mauthen/Kärnten, currently living in Vienna). The exhibition offers a closer look at a complex artist in the structure of his discourse and overwhelming intelligence in his way of conceiving his relationship with the consecrated language of art. His aesthetic experience spread across various territories that make him a major artist on the contemporary scene. Architecture, performance, design, video art, music and public art are only a few of the areas he has made incursions into, investigating their relationship with discourse, morphology and language. Over the course of years, his work has thus arrived at basic conjectures on the most intimate nature of “artistic vocabulary” and the modes of its socialization, yielding a greater role to the viewer as a co-creator and co-author of his work.

Heimo Zobernig is one of those chameleon-like artists why defy the classification and cubby-holing so often used by certain sectors.

This sample of his work declares his maturity as an artist just as it shows the recurrent, nearly obsessive ideas he has always conjugated in his work and that make up the starting point for all his projects. It is easy to pick up on a conceptual and narrative purpose to this pieces highlighting the stretching of borders and linguistic limits. Thus revealed is a reflection that spreads across three orders of action at work: a glance at architecture and its outrageous obsession for measurements made to fit humankind; the reflection on pure shapes in painting by exploring their innermost nature, and last but not least, approaching the morphological reality of sculpture starting with the image of a mannequin and re-converting it into an objet d’art with sweeping possibilities of language, especially in the realm of allegory.

Views to this exhibit will notice the internal dialog between each piece, and the sly winks between painting, installations (turned here into metaphors of architectural space) and sculpture (mannequins as alter-egos and doppelgangers of the artist). All this he does by means of a proposal that prioritizes conceptual language as well as narrative.