Art Metropole

Doug Aitken was born in California in 1968. He lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. Widely known for his innovative fine art installations, Doug Aitken is at the forefront of 21st century communication. Utilizing a wide array of media and artistic approaches, his eye leads us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts.

Aitken’s body of work ranges from photography, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, and installations. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, in such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Vienna Secession, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He participated in the Whitney Biennial 1997 and 2000 and earned the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999 for the installation electric earth.

Aitken’s Sleepwalkers exhibition at MoMA in 2007 transformed an entire block of Manhattan into an expansive cinematic experience as he covered the museum’s exteriors walls with projections. In 2009, his Sonic Pavilion opened to the public in the forested hills of Brazil at the new cultural foundation INHOTIM. Continuing his work in innovative outdoor projects, Aitken presented his large-scale film and architecture installation, Frontier, on Rome’s Isola Tiberina in November 2009 and at Art Basel Unlimited in 2010. Recently, Aitken’s multiform artwork Black Mirror engaged a site-specific multi-channel video installation and a live theatre performance on a uniquely designed barge floating off Athens and Hydra Island, Greece.

Michael Beutler (born 1976 in Oldenburg ) is a German sculptor and installation artist.

Beutler studied from 1997 to 2003 at the Städel School in Frankfurt at Thomas Bayrle and from 2000 to 2001 at the Glasgow School of Art (Master of Fine Arts Department.

His works range in the fields of sculpture , installation space and architecture . He “deals with architectural structures, convert to spaces and the ways these. He uses simple, mechanical, traceable for each method.” In much of his work is about “logical, economic processes.”

The Museum of Modern Art (MMK) in Frankfurt am Main has Beutler sculpture outdoor yellow from 2004, the last of the collective exhibition of the museum MMK 1991-2011. 20 years presence was shown.

For the portico in Frankfurt Beutler built in September 2007, a walk-in installation from screed curved grids – were glued and stacked into columns – with transparent floral paper in 15 different colors. Cracks and holes in colored paper and so translucent sunlight left the “construction in progress” light up like a cathedral.

Beutler installation of a 16 meter high pagoda of aluminum in the Lufthansa Aviation Center in 2008 was awarded with the mfi-Preis Kunst am Bau. The pagoda consists of nine different, superimposed huts – metallic sheen they refer to different cultures and thematize wanderlust and desire to travel.

In Frankfurt studio house based Beutler showed in 2010 along with five other former students Staedelschule its installation Carpet. The woven carpet made of old materials meanders through several rooms and doors. The loom that produces the carpet was in February / March 2010 in another exhibition of the artist in Milan.

Beutler lives and works in Berlin.

(from German wikipedia)

Monica Bonvicini was born in 1965 in Venice, Italy and lives and works in Berlin for many years. Since 2003 she teaches as a Professor for performative art and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Monica Bonvicini has had numerous solo shows and participated in many group exhibitions, among others: Berlin Biennale (1998, 2004), the Venice Biennial (1999; 2005 and 2011); Secession, Vienna (2003); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2005); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2006); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Sculpture Center, Long Island City (2007); Prospect.1 Biennial, New Orleans; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2008); Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Museion, Bolzano and The Art Institute of Chicago (2009); Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Museum Tinguely, Basel and Hayward Gallery, London (2010); Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; CAC – Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga; IVAM – Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencià (2011); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2011/12); Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Belvedere / 21er Haus, Vienna; and Deichtorhallen / Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (2012).

The most important awards Monica Bonvicini reveiced, are the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennial, 1999 and the Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst, Berlin in 2005.

Several monographs, artist’s books and publications have been published on and by Monica Bonvicini, among them: Monica Bonvicini, ­Kill your Father, Lübeck 2002; Stefan Bidner (Hg.), (Ed.), CUT – Monica Bonvicini, Cologne 2008; Matthias Mühling, Nikola Dietrich (Eds.), Monica Bonvicini, Cologne 2009; Monica Bonvicini, This Hammer Means Business, Cologne 2009; Rein Wolfs (Ed.), Monica Bonvicini. BOTH ENDS, Cologne 2010; CAC Málaga (Ed.), Monica Bonvicini, A BLACK HOLE OF NEEDS, HOPES AND AMBITIONS, Málaga 2011.

In 2010, Monica Bonvicini won the public competition of the Handball Plaza Light Art Commission in the framework of the London Olympic Games 2012. The large-scale, permanent outdoor sculpture RUN was completed in spring 2012. Earlier in 2010 Monica Bonvicini realized She Lies, a monumental sculpture out of stainless steel and glass panels that measures 12 × 17 × 16 m. The piece is permanently installed and floats amidst the water of the Bjørvika Fjord, in front of the building of the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet in Oslo.

A painter, printmaker and architect, Herbert Brandl was born in Graz, Austria, in 1959 and began to study at the Academy for the Decorative and Applied Arts under Herbert Tasquil and Peter Weibel in 1978. In 1980, while still unknown, Brandl was award the Styrian Förderungspreis for Art and held his first one-man show in 1984 at the ‘Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum’ in Graz. While still young, Brandl produced oil paintings in large formats, usually as diptychs and triptychs. Herbert Brandl’s abstract landscapes, still lifes and later his female nudes are notable for a dynamically pastose handling of paint. Herbert Brandl has continued to work out an analytical component in his work accompanied by a high degree of emotion while remaining preoccupied with the fundamental issues related to painting. Since the late 1990s Alpine scenery has occupied a crucial place in Brandl’s work. In his expansive paintings, the mountain motif is an optical illusion between abstraction and figuration, between explosive painterly colour spaces and the illusion of a natural spectacle. Herbert Brandl works from photographs and this gives rise to a discussion of the reality of media. Between 1985 and 1991 Herbert Brandl was a guest professor at the Veinna Academy for the Decorative and Applied arts. Since the beginning of his career, Brandl has had numerous one-man shows and has participated in exhibitions of international standing, including documenta IX in Kassel (1992), the group show organised by the Vienna Kunsthalle entitled Der zerbrochene Spiegel. Positionen zur Malerei (1993) and Painting on the Move at the Basle Kunsthalle (2002). Herbert Brandl lives and works in Vienna.

AA Bronson, born Michael Tims, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1946 -.

Alice Creischer, born in Gerolstein in 1960, studied Philosophy, German literature and Visual Arts in Düsseldorf. As one of the key figures of German political art movements in the Nineties, Creischer contributed to a great amount of collective projects, publications, and exhibitions. Her artistic and theoretic agenda within institutional and economical critique has evolved over 20 years, more recently focusing on the early history of capitalism and globalization. As co-curator of such paradigmatic exhibitions like Messe 2ok (1995), ExArgentina (2004) and The Potosi Principle (2010), Creischer has developed a specific curatorial practice that correlates with her work as an artist and theorist, including her extensive practice in archive research. As author Creischer has contributed to many publications, magazines and fanzines.

Born 1959 in Klagenfurt (AT), lives in Vienna (AT).

In her photographs, installations and projects, Ines Doujak examines the norms of human behaviour as structural and constituent elements of society from a decidedly feminist perspective. Her work is located in the complex context of artistic production and political agitation and defies the conventional concept of what constitutes a work of art.

In her Siegesgärten (Victory Gardens; 2007), Ines Doujak examines the neo-colonial practice of internal land-grabs after the external land-grabs of colonialism. The aesthetic as well as ethical diversity of life becomes a factor of economic value-creation, and capitalisation has destructive effects on local communities. Plants are flourishing in a long bed, marked with colourful seed packets which educate the viewer about global exploitation, genetic engineering and monoculture and rebel against these developments visually. On the front of the packets, plant photographs and collages also show a queered sexuality. On the back, conditions and consequences are described using sample products.

Born 1961, Boston, Massachusetts/Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Sam Durant’s politically engaged artistic practice is realized through photography, drawings, text, and sculpture. Transforming activist gestures into sculptural objects (and vice versa), the artist has extensively explored the notion of protest both as a subject and as material for visual art. His three-dimensional work often addresses architecture, civic design and, in particular, monuments. Durant’s 2005 exhibition entitled “Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monuments Transposition, Washington, D.C. proposed to assemble twenty-five monuments on the Washington Mall for lives lost during the Indian War. The project featured replicas of monuments from various locations throughout the United States, all of which made use of the ancient obelisk form that can be seen in commemorative statuary from the time of the pharaohs to today’s Washington Monument. Sam Durant received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. One-person exhibitions include, Scenes from the Pilgrim Story: Myths, Massacres and Monuments Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2007); Gagosian Gallery, London (2006); Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monuments Transposition Washington, D.C., Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2005); We Are All Outlaws in the Eyes of Amerika Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, Italy (2004); 12 Signs: Transposed and illuminated (with various indexes) Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2004, catalogue); Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2003, catalogue); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2002, catalogue); and Consciousness Raising Historical Analysis, Pain plus Time Separated and Ordered with Emphasis or Reflection Kunsthof Zürich (2001). Group shows include Black Panther Rank and File Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2006); Xiamen International Sculpture Exhibition, China (2005); 1st Moscow Biennale (2005); Monuments for the USA CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2005, catalogue); Whitney Biennial 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004, catalogue); 50th Venice Biennale (2003); Artists Imagine Architecture Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2002, catalogue); and Scene of the Crime Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (1997, catalogue).

Ayse Erkmen was born in 1949 in the old Greek quarter of Istanbul, where she spent her childhood and adolescence. She studied sculpture at the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts before launching her artistic career in an environment where the political context was far from stable. The artist’s youth was marked by the three military coups d’état that Turkey experienced between 1960 and 1980.

Between the 1980 coup d’état and the early 1990s when the military stranglehold started to be relaxed, Ayşe Erkmen’s activities remained confined to the borders of the country, cut off from the outside world. It was only when she obtained a DAAD scholarship in 1992 that the artist moved to Berlin and made contact again with the international scene. From then on, her production became remarkably consistent and has been represented at the most important events across the globe. Formally, her works are extremely diverse. Their common characteristic is that they have all been designed for a specific place at a given time, thus becoming untransportable and irreplacable within the environment in which they were designed.

Starting with her first installations and sculptures, which have now almost entirely disappeared – only a select number are visible, via their photographic documentation – Ayşe Erkmen developed her own minimalist language and maintained close ties with conceptual art. She favours the processes of devising and producing the work as opposed to the finished product, and focuses on the almost invisible (or almost visible) and the infinitely small. Her installations blend in so well with the environment they find themselves in that they are sometimes only perceptible by chance.

Marcus Geiger (born 1957) is an artist whose work employs quotidian materials and labored processes, reflecting on the nature of the “work of art” while taking an adamant stand outside of the art market. Recent exhibitions include: Heimspiel [home match], Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, 2012; Reflecting Fashion: Art and Fashion Since Modernism, MUMOK Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, 2012; and Great Prospects!, 21er Haus, Vienna, 2011. Geiger lives and works in Vienna.

Born in Innsbruck in 1957; lives and works in Innsbruck and Düsseldorf.

Martin Gostner works in the fields of installation, film, painting, and photography. He also teaches at the Kunstakademie (Art Academy) Düsseldorf.

Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made and thought.

Green’s work has been included in many group exhibitions; selected venues include Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst und Medien (KM–) in Graz, Austria; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; MACBA, Barcelona; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; International Center of Photography, New York & Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen; her work has also been presented at the Whitney, Venice, Johannesburg, Kwangju, Berlin, Sevilla, Manifesta & Istanbul Biennials, as well as in Documenta 11.

Henrik Håkansson is one of most internationally successful and renowned Swedish artists of his generation, but this is his first comprehensive solo exhibition in his own country in several years. Looking back at his production of the last twenty years we notice how consistently he works with the relation between nature and culture, but also how he varies his expression by using film, photography, sound and—not least—plants and live animals.

Håkansson’s current work is grounded in his thinking about wastelands. He refers to T. S. Eliot’s poem from 1922, The Waste Land, and to our negligence and mental confusion about nature, the gap between our knowledge and our actions in matters concerning ecology. Visitors to Lunds konsthall are confronted with a staged forest. Tall spruces have been uprooted and cut in half. This large installation fills the front and rear halls and have given the whole exhibition its title: A Forest Divided. The spruces come from the heath at Veberöd outside Lund, a forested area that is being cut down to restore an original and more open landscape. The trees are divided, spliced, with open wounds.

Around the divided forest there swarms of dark brown birds are hovering. These stuffed starlings once lived near an airport in northern Italy, where they were shot to prevent accidents and disruptions of traffic. They are mounted as hanging mobiles, a reference to one of the big names of 20th century Modernism, Alexander Calder. Such allusions to the history of art, music, cinema, and literature is an important aspect of Håkansson’s practice, which unites the art-specific and the scientific.

This is a concentrated exhibition, but also varied and collage-like. It showcases Håkansson’s newest productions, but also wants to give viewers a general understanding of his art and how he thinks in images. Therefore it consists of a selection of inter-related works, mostly from recent years, many of which relate to an ongoing debate about the management of natural resources and specifically about forestry. Henrik Håkansson: A Forest Divided is to some degree a retrospective, but it does not aspire to provide a complete overview of his practice and career.

Lunds konsthall thanks the County Administrative Board of Skåne for their support to the realisation of the exhibition and all lenders, including the galleries Franco Noero in Turin, The Modern Institute in Glasgow and Meyer Rigger Berlin, as well as the Sten A Olson Foundation for Research and Culture in Gothenburg.

Henrik Håkansson was born in 1968 in Helsingborg, Sweden. He lives and works in Sweden and Germany. Håkansson graduated in 1991 from the Academy of Photography and in 1993 from the Dept. of Sculpture, both at the University College of Art, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. He has participated in many international group exhibitions, for instance the Venice Biennale (1997, 2003), the Berlin Biennial (2001), the São Paulo Biennial (2004), and the Yokohama Triennial (2011). He has had solo exhibitions at, for instance, Kunsthalle Basel (1999), Wiener Secession (2002), De Appel, Amsterdam (2003), c/o Moderna Museet at the House of the Nobility in Stockholm (2003), Dunkers kulturhus in Helsingborg (2004), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2006), and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2008).

Charline von Heyl (born 1960) is a German artist who lives and works in New York. Von Heyl is largely known for her abstract painting. She also works with drawing, printmaking, and collage. She is represented by the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York City, the Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne, and 1301PE in Los Angeles.

In 2005, von Heyl’s exhibition Concentrations 48: Charline von Heyl was held at the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas, USA, and in 2009, her work was exhibited in Le jour de boire est arrivé held at Le Consortium, a contemporary art center in Dijon, France.

In 2011-2012, Heyl had two major traveling retrospectives. Charline von Heyl, Now or Else started at the Tate Liverpool in Liverpool, England and subsequently traveled to the Kunsthalle Nürnberg in Nuremberg, Germany and the Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn, Germany. A second show, Charline von Heyl, was exhibited within the USA at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

(from wikipedia)

Born 1967 in Seoul, lives and works in Paris.

Solo Exhibitions (selection): 2002 121002very CCA Kitakyushu; The Land of Ousss, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; 2001 Yvon Lambert, Paris; To fall to dive, Shima/Island, Kyoto; 1998 Ousss, Ousss, Ousss, place Stalingrad, 75010 Paris; Moderna Museet Projekt, Stockholm; Group Exhibitions (selection): 2001 Yokohama Triennial, Yokohama; 2000 Manifesta 3, Ljubljana; Snapshot, Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore; From a Distance: Approaching Landscape, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; 1999 Hayward Gallery, London; Laboratorium, Antwerpen; Passage, Sategaya Museum, Tokyo; 1998 Unfinished History, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Dust memories, Frac de Bourgogne, Dijon; 1997 Kwangiu Biennale, Korea; Cities on the move, Secession, Vienna.

In her interventions and installations, Koo Jeong-a starts from the constitution of an exhibition location and simultaneously identifies the most advantageous form for the placement of her objects there. Koo Jeong-a’s compositions are often more firmly rooted in poetic than in sculptural thinking, and they have the delicateness and lightness of dream worlds. In her subtle and meditative, but no less sober manner, Koo Jeong-a leaves the objects their banality, rather than seeking to enhance their value, but at the same time, she attributes structural positions to them with the constellation. The way in which it all comes together, the way in which the objects mutually relate to and condition one another, has nothing random about it. Instead, it follows an order, in which microcosm and macrocosm correspond.

For the Secession, Koo Jeong-a has created a sequence of installations, to which the title 3355 offers an approach that is equally metaphorical and concrete. In Korean, 3355 designates the special situations, in which one can observe a group of people from a distance, the way in which people form small, not precisely defined groups, in order to meet, converse, or even to demonstrate for/against something. A pattern in between order and disorder that applies equally to the view from a coffeehouse window and a public square on market day.

Contracted, however, 3355 can also be read as three thousand three hundred and fifty-five and interpreted as a date or a period of time: a dimension of duration that resembles a standstill, a frozen moment of time.

With her precise placements, Koo Jeong-a creates lasting moments, atmospheric landscapes that call for watchfulness, presupposing a recognition and remembering on the part of the viewers in order to be accepted.

With the works in the Secession, the question of perspective is also raised in the way that Koo Jeong-a stages the change of the viewers’ perspective. The distanced survey of a worktable in the first exhibition room is supplemented with an interior view of the coldness of a white cell, which Koo Jeong-a places in the next room. Moments of hiding and a desired isolation define these independent interiors. Like in a dream, Koo Jeong-a thus achieves a correlation between inside and outside. Her intention is to publicly display what is one’s own, but without surrendering it this way or for this reason. In the third room, there is a series of drawings, which are shown as a new group of works for the first time at the Secession.

Brian Jungen was born in 1970 on a family farm north of Fort St. John, British Columbia. His father was Swiss born and immigrated to British Columbia with his family when he was three years old. Jungen’s mother was Aboriginal, a member of the Dane-zaa Nation. Jungen was seven years old when both his parents perished in a fire. After which he was raised by his fathers’ sister and her husband. Jungen recalls his mother’s ability to adapt objects to new uses, something he now famously does within his artistic practice. He recalls “She was constantly trying to extend the life of things, packages, utensils. Once we had to use the back end of a pickup truck as an extension for our hog pen.”

In 1988 he moved to Vancouver to attend the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He graduated four years later with a Diploma of Visual Art. After which he moved to Montreal and New York City prior to returning to Vancouver.

In 1998 he took part in a self-directed residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta. This residency would become the tipping point in his career. As it was there that he began to work on his now famous Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005); a series of sculptures he created by disassembling and reassembling Nike Air Jordan sneakers to resemble Northwest Coast Aboriginal masks. He would go on to explore his interest in using sports paraphernalia creating sculptures out of catchers mitts, baseball bats, and basket ball jerseys. Jungen has stated that it is a deliberate choice to create works out of materials produced by the sports industry; an industry that appropriates Aboriginal terminology, such as the team names The Chiefs, Indians, Redskins and Braves. However Jungen’s work is not exclusively tied to his heritage. He has stated “My involvement with my family and traditions is personal – it’s not where my art comes from.”

His interest in architecture and in particular Buckminster Fuller is also evident in his practice with his creation of multiple shelters for humans, animals and birds. Overriding the majority of his work is Jungen’s ability to disassemble and reassemble objects maintaining the integrity and meaning of his source material and yet creating new possibilities for meaning Shapeshifter (2000) / Transmutation (2000).

Brian Jungen was the winner of the inaugural Sobey Art Award in 2002 and the 2010 Gershon Iskowitz Prize.

Terence Koh (born 1977 in Beijing, China) is a Canadian artist. Koh creates handmade books and zines, prints, photographs, sculptures, performances, and installations. Much of his diverse work involves queer, punk, and pornographic sensibilities. Koh has also worked under the alias “asianpunkboy”, though it appears that name has been retired as of 2009. In 2008, he was listed in Out magazine’s “Out 100 People of the Year”.

Koh was raised in Mississauga, Ontario, and lives in New York City. He is a Chinese-Canadian artist who received his Bachelor degree from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver.

Terence Koh was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2008. He has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. Koh’s work has been the subject of several major solo exhibitions including Love for Eternity, a mid-career retrospective at MUSAC (Leon, Spain); Captain Buddha, Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany); Dirty Blind God, de Pury & Luxembourg, (Zurich, Switzerland); Terence Koh Whitney Museum of American Art, (New York).

In the tradition of Piero Manzoni, Koh has gold-plated and sold his own feces for a total of $500,000.00 to collectors. He is represented by Javier Peres of in Los Angeles and Berlin, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg and Paris.

In 2008 he created the Terence Koh Show on YouTube, in which visitors to his home are either interviewed by Koh, or interview Koh themselves. Each show is usually not more than a few minutes in length. Some episodes are more abstract, such as when he plays the video forward but edits the sound to play backwards. Notable guests have included Marina Abramović, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and most recently, Lady Gaga. In the clip with Lady Gaga titled 88 pearls, Koh counts a bowl of pearls with Lady Gaga, who is wearing a costume inspired by Koh’s sculpture from his project Boy By The Sea. Koh’s affiliation with the pop star began at the 2010 Grammys, where Lady Gaga performed on a piano designed by Koh specifically for the occasion.

Koh’s work has been associated with New Gothic Art.

In nothingtoodoo, his first solo show at the Mary Boone Gallery, Koh, “dressed in white pajamalike clothes, slowly circl[es] a beautiful cone-shaped pile of rocky solar salt — 8 feet high and 24 feet across — on his knees.” So Roberta Smith described the work in an appreciative March, 2011, review. “This is performance art reduced to a bare and relentless rite in a space that has been stripped down to a kind of temple. (Its regal proportions help.) … Maybe the work is an extended apology for past bad-boy behavior.

(from wikipedia)

Elke Krystufek (b. Austria, 1970) is an Austrian self portraitist working in a variety of media including: painting, sculpture, video and performance art.

Krystufek studied at the Fine Arts Academy of Vienna in the early 1990s. Her work is informed, by a history of Austrian artists – from Egon Schiele to the Vienna Actionists – who have explicitly explored sexuality in art.

Elke Krystufek is a visual artist and writer. Since her first big solo presentation at the Secession in Vienna in 1997, she is working on the subject of the “Archive”. Her collection of images in the form of postcardsize photographs, titled I am your mirror took inspiration of the documentary work of photographer Nan Goldin and the Atlas by the German Painter Gerhard Richter. With the exhibition Liquid Logic at the then direction of Peter Noever, who gave her access into all storages of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, the MAK, she drew comparisons between a thematically arranged Selection of partly never shown pieces from the depots of the museum and the biography of the Dutch-American artist Bas Jan Ader. Selections of a film, that she shot in connection with the exhibition on Easterisland can be viewed on YouTube in parts as the background of a talk she gave in 2009 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. 2009 she represented Austria at the Austrian Pavillon at the 53rd Biennale of Venice together with Dorit Margreiter and Franziska and Lois Weinberger. In this show she dealt with the rare arthistorical phenomenon of a nude male model painted by a heterosexual woman and the last film by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Tabu. Since her solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the gallery gives access to part of the Elke Krystufek Archive on the subject of immigration. On 13 April 2011 her first theater play Hub premiered at the Garage X, Theater at Petersplatz in Vienna. On 27 May her first public outdoor sculpture titled The Wall of Silence in the Schlosspark Grafenegg was destroyed on desire of Tassilo Metternich-Sándor. A documentation of the destruction and a fragment of the sculpture have been archived as a donation by the artist at the Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum. For November 2012 a large overview of a body of work in relation to landscape painting is planned at the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin.

Albert Oehlen’s distinct oeuvre, characterized by its heterogeneity of method, palette, and genre, makes painting its subject as well as its medium. His indifference in working in collage, abstraction, and figuration enables a unique dialogue amid styles. In a process reminiscent of the Surrealists’ “exquisite corpse” exercise, one method seemingly spontaneously begets another, and a tattered piece of ephemera will become the foundation for a bold field of color. Computer-aided designs bring another dimension into the fold, juxtaposing the artist’s hand against the mark of the machine, and action and reaction weave into an amorphous visual language.

Albert Oehlen (b. 1954, Krefeld, Germany) lives and works in Germany, Switzerland, and Spain. His solo museum exhibitions include those at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1997); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2005); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2006); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2009); Räume für Kunst, Freiburg, Germany (2010); and Carré d’Art, Nîmes (2011). A retrospective of his work was held at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2004–05).

In his conceptually rigorous and often witty work, Berlin-based artist Henrik Olesen (b. 1967, Esbjerg, Denmark) investigates structures of power and systems of knowledge to reveal inherent logics and rules of social and political normalization. Olesen’s projects, based on in-depth research, have addressed a range of subjects including legal codes, the natural sciences, distribution of capital, and art history, and have taken the form of posters, fliers, text, collages, found-object sculptures, and spatial interventions. In past works, Olesen has compiled examples of “sodomy law” from around the world as testimony to the persistent criminalization of homosexuality; assembled a vast atlas of conspicuous and yet rarely acknowledged expressions of same-sex desire or affection in Western art history; and, most recently, created a historical and imagined portrait—in photo-text collages and sculptural objects—of British mathematician Alan Turing, who was persecuted for his sexual orientation despite his professional achievements and patriotic contributions.

Rita McBride lives in Los Angeles and Düsseldorf where she is a professor at the Kunstakademie. McBride’s first solo museum show was at Witte de With in 1997. Subsequently her work has been the subject of museum exhibitions in Austria, France, Germany, Liechtenstein, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. Since she began exhibiting in the late 1980s, McBride has explored the role of often overlooked mainstays of public space. With an eye trained on modernistic objects and architecture, her sculptures toy with the functionalism and formalism of public structures. In 2011, Mae West, McBride’s 52 meter tall carbon steel sculpture, which is located on the Effnerplatz in Munich, was unveiled. As a sculpture, Mae West is not only one of the largest to ever be realized but sets a new principle with regard to sculpture’s relationship with gravity. McBride’s work is the subject of a solo exhibition at MACBA: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2012. The exhibition, Oferta Pública/Public Tender, was curated by Baromeu Mari and functioned as a discourse between McBride’s work and the architecture of the museum itself. In the fall of 2013, a solo exhibition of McBride’s work will open at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and will be on view through the spring of 2014.

Muntean/Rosenblum (Markus Muntean; born 1962 in Graz, Austria and Adi Rosenblum; born 1962 in Haifa, Israel) are artists based in Vienna and London. Collaborating since 1992, they focus on modes of representation that are considered traditional ways of formulating pathos and are borrowed from classical iconography. Color symbolism, hand gestures, and physical postures are taken from the Christian visual tradition, but divorced from the religious context and applied to the present. Teenagers and young adults appear in generally anonymous urban contexts: these urban settings seem to have been taken from fashion or lifestyle magazines. Muntean/Rosenblum use found material from magazines and journals, collective and media images of a consumer oriented youth culture to raise questions of identity and the subject. The contemporary outfits, which promise individuality and self-confidence, form a sharp contrast to the mannered gestures and poses. Characteristic of their drawings and paintings are subtitles in capital letters on a white background. The supposedly deep, philosophical statements are taken from various fragments from magazines and philosophical texts. Alongside classical media like canvas and paper, Muntean/Rosenblum also use film and installation for their remix of traditional art history and the social.

Muntean Rosenblum have shown their work at exhibitions at Mucsarnok Budapest (2009), Sammlung Essl (2008/09), Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2007), Vienna’s Museum für angewandte Kunst (2006), Tate Britain (2004), and Amsterdam’s De Appel Museum (2002).

Florian Pumhösl constructs new referential systems, based on the mediation of avant-gardes graphic, painterly and architectonic tropes. His 16mm films and animations assimilate techniques and motifs of early scientific and abstract experimental film-making to constitute original reflections on the cinematic apparatus and its implications. Minimal glass paintings, which reproduce basic geometrical shapes, and films are woven together on an equal level with historical elements in considered exhibition displays. Pumhösl focuses particularly on strategies of appropriation, citation and montage and the research of European, Russian and Japanese art and architecture avant-gardes as the aesthetic equivalent to the mechanization of industrial production.

Florian Pumhösl lives and works in Vienna.

Josephine Pryde (born 1967, Alnwick, Northumberland) is an English artist. In 2010, reviewing a show of Pryde’s work which featured “seven colour photographs of extreme close-ups of clothing on a body, and four sculptures made from half-finished woven baskets and metal butcher’s hooks,” the reviewer Dan Fox said that the work “seemed somewhat aloof,” adding his opinion that “there was a healthy cynicism here perhaps worth listening to.” On 27 May 2011, an exhibition of Pryde’s photographs – titled Embryos and Estate Agents: L’Art de Vivre – went on display at the Chisenhale Gallery in East London.

Trina Robbins (born 1938) is an American comics artist and writer. She was an early and influential participant in the underground comix movement, and one of the few female artists in underground comix when she started. Both as a cartoonist and historian, Robbins has long been involved in creating outlets for and promoting female comics artists. With writer Forrest J. Ackerman, she was the artist co-creator of the character Vampirella.

Robbins became an active member of science fiction fandom in the 1950s, and her illustrations appeared in science fiction fanzines such as the Hugo-nominated Habakkuk.

Robbins’ first comics were printed in the East Village Other; she also contributed to the spin-off underground comic Gothic Blimp Works.

In 1970 Robbins left New York for San Francisco, where she worked at the feminist underground newspaper It Ain’t Me, Babe. That same year she established the first all-woman comic book, the one-shot It Ain’t Me, Babe Comix. From this period on, Robbins became increasingly involved in creating outlets for and promoting female comics artists, through projects such as the comics anthology Wimmen’s Comix, with which she was involved for twenty years. Wimmen’s Comix #1 featured Robbins’ Sandy Comes Out, the first-ever comic strip featuring an “out” lesbian.

Robbins was becoming increasingly outspoken in her beliefs, for instance criticizing underground comix pioneer Robert Crumb for the perceived misogyny of many of his comics. She stated, “It’s weird to me how willing people are to overlook the hideous darkness in Crumb’s work…. What the hell is funny about rape and murder?” Robbins’ lack of regard for R. Crumb reportedly played a part in her falling out with fellow Wimmen’s Comix contributor Aline Kominsky (Crumb’s girlfriend at the time, now his wife), who, along with fellow Wimmen’s Comix contributor Diane Noomin, left the collective in 1975 to form their own all-female anthology, Twisted Sisters.

Robbins was artist co-creator of the Warren Publishing character Vampirella, designing her costume and hair for writer Forrest J. Ackerman’s story Vampirella of Draculona in Vampirella #1 (Sept. 1969).

In the early 1980s Robbins created adaptations of Sax Rohmer’s Dope and Tanith Lee’s The Silver Metal Lover. In the mid-1980s she wrote and drew Misty for the Marvel Comics children’s imprint Star Comics. The short-lived series was a reinterpretation of the long-standing character Millie the Model, now as an older character running her own modeling agency and minding her niece Misty.

Robbins’ official involvement with Wonder Woman, a character she had long admired, began in 1986. At the conclusion of the first volume of the series (in conjunction with the landmark series Crisis on Infinite Earths), DC Comics published a four-issue limited series titled The Legend of Wonder Woman, written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Robbins. The series paid homage to the character’s Golden Age roots. She also appeared as herself in Wonder Woman Annual 2 (1989). In the mid-1990s, Robbins criticized artist Mike Deodato’s “bad girl art” portrayal of Wonder Woman, calling Deodato’s version of the character a “barely clothed hypersexual pinup.” In the late 1990s, Robbins collaborated with Colleen Doran on the DC Comics graphic novel Wonder Woman: The Once and Future Story, on the subject of spousal abuse.

Recently, Robbins has been writing the comic book adventures of Honey West, notable as being one of popular fiction’s first female private detectives.

In addition to her comics work, Robbins is an author of nonfiction books, including several with an emphasis on the history of women in cartooning.

Her first book, co-written with Catherine Yronwode, was Women and the Comics, on the history of female comic-strip and comic-book creators. As one of the first book on this subject, its publication was covered in the mainstream press, in addition to the fan press. Subsequent Robbins volumes on the history of women in the comics industry include A Century of Women Cartoonists (Kitchen Sink, 1993), The Great Women Superheroes (Kitchen Sink, 1997), From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (Chronicle, 1999), and The Great Women Cartoonists (Watson-Guptill, 2001) Robbins is working on yet another work of this kind for Fantagraphics.

Robbins was a co-founder of Friends of Lulu, a nonprofit formed in 1994 to promote readership of comic books by women and the participation of women in the comic book industry.

Robbins lives in San Francisco with her partner, comics artist Steve Leialoha.

Robbins is the first of the three “Ladies of the Canyon” in Joni Mitchell’s classic song from the album of the same name.

Robbins was a Special Guest of the 1977 San Diego Comic-Con, when she was presented with an Inkpot Award. She won a Special Achievement Award from the San Diego Comic Con in 1989 for her work on Strip AIDS U.S.A., a benefit book that she co-edited with Bill Sienkiewicz and Robert Triptow.

She was the 1992 Guest of Honor of WisCon, the Wisconsin Science Fiction Convention, often called the world’s leading feminist-oriented science fiction convention and conference.

In 1997, Robbins was a “Lulu of the Year” winner for her book The Great Women Superheroes.

In 2002, Robbins was given the Special John Buscema Haxtur Award, a recognition for comics published in Spain.

Robbins was a special guest of the 2006 Sac-Anime convention.

In 2011, Robbins’ artwork was exhibited as part of the Koffler Gallery show Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women.

Born in 1970 and based in Vienna, Hans Schabus is an artist whose work as a sculptor explores the body, architecture and the environment. Using photographs, films, drawings, collages, subverted objects and installations based on pieces of furniture, his work, which is often unexpected and always striking, is rarely devoid of humour. His contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2005, where he was representing Austria, created a lasting impression. The artist daringly wrapped the Austrian Pavilion in an architectural structure depicting a mountain which visitors were invited to explore.

Eva Schlegel was born in Hall in Tirol, Austria, in 1960. She lives and works in Vienna.

Her work has been extensively exhibited at galleries and museums in Europe, the Sydney Biennial and the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Neue Galerie Joanneum, Graz, the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, and the Museum für Lackkunst, Münster.

Lives and works in Mönchengladbach, Rheydt, Germany.

Gregor Schneider is one of the most famous artists of his generation. He studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and Münster, the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and he has worked as guest professor in several universities around the world.

His works reflect his deep fears and traumas, however, in dealing with these issues he hopes to help us to reflect upon and overcome our nightmares. He became world famous when we won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001 with an installation of his childhood home, Totes Haus U R. The place was transformed into a maze with fake partitions, lead-lined rooms and a kitchen encrusted with mould.

Last year Schneider became embroiled in controversy after saying he wanted to create a space in a museum in which people could die. His argument was that society’s horror of death was so acute that we prefer to ignore it, leaving people to die in the clinical impersonality of a hospital rather than somewhere beautiful.

Selected solo exhibitions: Scheiß e-mails, Future Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2012); cube venice, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, Italy (2008); Gregor Schneider, La Maison Rouge, Paris, France (2008); Dead House Ur, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, USA (2003)

Selected group exhibitions: Fotografie Total – Werke Aus Der Sammlung Des Mmk, Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt/Main, Germany (2012); Artandpress, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany (2012); Façade, National Glass Centre, Sunderland, England (2011); Goldfish Suddenly Dead – Extra City, Kunsthal Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium (2009)

Simon Starling (born 1967) is an English conceptual artist and won the Turner Prize in 2005.

Simon Starling was born in 1967 in Epsom, Surrey. He studied photography and art at Maidstone College of Art from 1986 to 1987, then at Trent Polytechnic Nottingham from 1987 to 1990 and then attended Glasgow School of Art from 1990 to 1992. From 1993 to 1996, he was a committee member of Transmission Gallery, Glasgow.

Starling was the first recipient of the Blinky Palermo Grant in 1999. In 2005, he won the Turner Prize with the work, Shedboatshed that involved taking a wooden shed, turning it into a boat, sailing it down the Rhine and turning it back into a shed. Starling was short-listed for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize for contemporary art in 2004.

His work is in the permanent collection of distinguished museums, such as the Tate Modern, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Kroller Muller Museum, Netherlands; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Museum Folkwang, Essen. Starling has had solo exhibitions at numerous international venues including Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary, Vienna (2012); the Power Plant, Toronto (2008); Städtischen Kunstmuseum zum Museum Folkwang, Essen (2007); Kunstmuseum Basel Museum für Gegenwartskunst (2005); Museum of Modern Art, Sydney (2002); Portikus, Frankfurt (2002); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2002); Kunstverein Hamburg (2001); Vienna Secession (2001), Museu Serralves, Porto (2000); Camden Arts Centre, London (1998); and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1998), among others. In 2003, the artist represented Scotland at the 50th Venice Biennial.

Since the early 1990s, Diana Thater has created pioneering film, video, and installation-based works. Her primary emphasis is on the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, and by extension, between tamed and wild, and science and magic. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative and sometimes near-abstract works interact with their surroundings to create an intricate relationship between time-based and spatial dimensions. She frequently transforms the exhibition venue into a hybrid space between sculpture and architecture, using color and light alongside her installations.

Born in 1962 in San Francisco, Thater studied Art History at New York University, before receiving her M.F.A. from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Since 1993, her work has been represented by David Zwirner. In 2010, the gallery presented Diana Thater: Between Science and Magic, which premiered earlier that year at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California. In 2012, Chernobyl marked her seventh solo show at the gallery.

Over the past decade, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions, including the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2011); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; Natural History Museum, London (both 2009); Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany (both 2004); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2001); and the Secession, Vienna (2000).

She recently received a 2011 Award for Artistic Innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Los Angeles, and other notable awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a Phelan Award in Film and Video.

Work by the artist is represented in museum collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin. Also a prolific writer, educator, and curator, Thater lives and works in Los Angeles.

Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires in 1961 and was raised in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada. He studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto (1980–84), Banff Center School of Fine Arts (1984), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1984–86), and Whitney Independent Studies Program in New York (1985–86). Since the 1990s, Tiravanija has aligned his artistic production with an ethic of social engagement, often inviting viewers to inhabit and activate his work. In one of his best-known series, begun with pad thai (1990) at the Paula Allen Gallery in New York, Tiravanija rejected traditional art objects altogether and instead cooked and served food for exhibition visitors. For his second solo exhibition in New York, held at 303 Gallery in 1992, Tiravanija filled the white rooms with stacks of cultural cast-offs, rendering the space into what seemed like a storage facility, demoting the primacy of the revered art object.

Over the following years, the artist ignored the prescribed division between art and life, constructing communal environments that offer a playful alternative venue for quotidian activities. In 1997 Tiravanija began an engagement with the monoliths of modernist architecture when he installed in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden Untitled: 1997 (Glass House), a child-size version of Philip Johnson’s famed Glass House (1949). Similarly, untitled 2002 (he promised) is an arena of activities ranging from DJ sessions to film screenings within a chrome and steel structure inspired by Rudolf M. Schindler’s iconic Kings Road House (1922) in West Hollywood. For A retrospective (tomorrow is another fine day) (2004), viewers are guided through a seemingly objectless modernist space in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, inhabited only by minimal architectural interventions, tour guides, and theatrical readings by Tiravanija’s friend, artist Philippe Parreno. In 2005 Parreno and Tiravanija collaboratively constructed five puppets caricaturizing themselves and three other artists (Pierre Huyghe, Liam Gillick, and Hans Ulrich Obrist), which were then employed for the film untitled 2005 (stories are propaganda). His engagement with propaganda can also be seen in his ongoing series of commissioned drawings derived from newspaper images and in untitled 2006 (fear eats the soul/ November 1–8, 2004), in which Tiravanija painted the phrase “fear eats the soul” over the front page of The New York Times. For his ongoing project The Land (begun in 1998), a collaborative artistic, architectural, and environmental recovery project in Sanpatong, Thailand, residents and artists are welcomed to use a plot of land as a laboratory for development, cultivating rice, building sustainable houses, or channeling solar power.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted by Reiña Sofia in Madrid (1994), Museum of Modern Art in New York (1997), Philadelphia Museum of Art (1998), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1999), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo (2002), Chaing Mai University Art Museum (2004), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2004), and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2005). Tiravanija’s work has also been included in major exhibitions such as Venice Biennale (1993 and 1999), Whitney Biennial (1995 and 2005), Liverpool Biennial (2002 and 2004), São Paulo Bienal (2006), The Shapes of Space at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2007), Installations: Selection from the Guggenheim Collections at Guggenheim Bilbao (2008), and theanyspacewhatever at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008). For the Venice Biennale in 2003, the artist co-curated Utopia Station, and exhibition that later showed in Haus der Kunst in Munich. Tiravanija’s work has been recognized with numerous awards and grants including a Gordon Matta Clark Foundation Award, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award (1993), National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship (1994), the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2003), and the Hugo Boss Prize from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2004). He lives and works in New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai.

Sue Williams is a prominent artist with a recognised body of work and an exhibition history of both solo and group shows on five continents. The work is both raw and accomplished; strong, charged and challenging in its links to contemporary lives and the sexualisation of western society.

She has taken part in many exhibitions and residencies and has a clutch of prestigious awards recognising her art including the National Eisteddfod Wales (Gold Medal winner 2000), the Rootstein Hopkins Award (2000) and has shown in the Avesta Biennial, Sweden (2000) and the Site-ations Project in New York (2001). She was a shortlisted artist for the Artes Mundi 2, International Visual Art Prize 2006 selected by Deepak Ananth and Ivo Mesquita. In 2009 she was awarded a major Creative Wales Award by Arts Council of Wales. Her work features in several leading private and public collections throughout USA, Africa and Europe including the National Museum & Galleries of Wales; Contemporary Arts Society; Welsh Assembly Government and The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.

Sue Williams’ continues to explore and challenge the fantasies of feminism, sexuality, gender and culture in her work, in doing so she offers her passionate and direct response to the complex world of human frailty – the stuff of life. Throughout her work she is constantly revealing an ambiguous boundary between a secure place and an insecure place, between the real and the imagined, drawing the viewer into her world of provocative sexual politics. Drawing plays a major role within her work and it is through the use of the drawn image that Sue Williams’ preoccupation with the notion of desire and frailty unfolds. The canvas and the paper are tools for the artist to manipulate, the use of text and material beyond the surface of the canvas adds to the theatrical and the unconventional, the disconnectedness of human connectedness revealed in Sue Williams’ work.

Sue Williams’ work strongly supports the notion of drawing as an urgent and immediate form of non-verbal communication. This drawing installation started in 2003 and continues as a deep source of ideas for developing concepts and producing new bodies of work. There are already over 1,000 drawings founded upon the notion of the ‘spaces in-between’ the artists interpretation of everyday living, drawn from observations and experiences of both the virtual world and the real world. Through drawing and manipulation of other materials she reveals truths and untruths, often subverting what we think we know and the lies we tell to protect ourselves and each other in a riot of image and text, in both a serious and playful manner. Through the process of drawing the artist begins to understand and to reveal the bigger pictures, the ‘spaces in-between’, as they manifest themselves through edge-defying canvas installations, visually stimulating theatre installations, drawing installations and film.

Sue Williams is a prominent artist with a recognised body of work and an exhibition history of both solo and group shows on five continents. The work is both raw and accomplished; strong, charged and challenging in its links to contemporary lives and the sexualisation of western society.

She has taken part in many exhibitions and residencies and has a clutch of prestigious awards recognising her art including the National Eisteddfod Wales (Gold Medal winner 2000), the Rootstein Hopkins Award (2000) and has shown in the Avesta Biennial, Sweden (2000) and the Site-ations Project in New York (2001). She was a shortlisted artist for the Artes Mundi 2, International Visual Art Prize 2006 selected by Deepak Ananth and Ivo Mesquita. In 2009 she was awarded a major Creative Wales Award by Arts Council of Wales. Her work features in several leading private and public collections throughout USA, Africa and Europe including the National Museum & Galleries of Wales; Contemporary Arts Society; Welsh Assembly Government and The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.

Sue Williams’ continues to explore and challenge the fantasies of feminism, sexuality, gender and culture in her work, in doing so she offers her passionate and direct response to the complex world of human frailty – the stuff of life. Throughout her work she is constantly revealing an ambiguous boundary between a secure place and an insecure place, between the real and the imagined, drawing the viewer into her world of provocative sexual politics. Drawing plays a major role within her work and it is through the use of the drawn image that Sue Williams’ preoccupation with the notion of desire and frailty unfolds. The canvas and the paper are tools for the artist to manipulate, the use of text and material beyond the surface of the canvas adds to the theatrical and the unconventional, the disconnectedness of human connectedness revealed in Sue Williams’ work.

Sue Williams’ work strongly supports the notion of drawing as an urgent and immediate form of non-verbal communication. This drawing installation started in 2003 and continues as a deep source of ideas for developing concepts and producing new bodies of work. There are already over 1,000 drawings founded upon the notion of the ‘spaces in-between’ the artists interpretation of everyday living, drawn from observations and experiences of both the virtual world and the real world. Through drawing and manipulation of other materials she reveals truths and untruths, often subverting what we think we know and the lies we tell to protect ourselves and each other in a riot of image and text, in both a serious and playful manner. Through the process of drawing the artist begins to understand and to reveal the bigger pictures, the ‘spaces in-between’, as they manifest themselves through edge-defying canvas installations, visually stimulating theatre installations, drawing installations and film.

Manfred Willmann – born in Graz, Austria, in 1952 – is regarded as one of the most important photo artists in Europe. As head of Fotogalerie im Forum Stadtpark Graz, he organized exhibitions on Austrian and international contemporary photography; 1979 to 1996 he organized in collaboration with Christine Frisinghelli annual symposia on photography. 1980 founder and until 2010 publisher of CAMERA AUSTRIA International which developed into the leading photography magazine in Europe. Regular visits to the South-Western Styria region of his homeland gave rise to the Das Land cycle from 1981 onwards. In 1994, Manfred Willmann was awarded the Cultural Award by the German Photographic Association (DGPh); in 2009, he received the Austrian State Award for Photography. His works are widely exhibited, including in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Christopher Wool (born 1955, Chicago) is an American artist residing in New York City. Since the 1980s, Wool’s studio practice has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas.

In his abstract paintings Wool brings together figures and the disfigured, drawing and painting, spontaneous impulses and well thought-out ideas. He draws lines on the canvas with a spray gun and then, directly after, wipes them out again with a rag drenched in solvent to give a new picture in which clear lines have to stand their own against smeared surfaces.

Writing in 2000, in The New York Times, Ken Johnson highlighted Wool’s response to an observation made on the street as significant, “in the 1980s, Christopher Wool was doing a Neo-Pop sort of painting using commercial rollers to apply decorative patterns to white panels. One day he saw a new white truck violated by the spray-painted words ‘sex’ and ‘luv.’ Mr. Wool made his own painting using those words and went on to make paintings with big, black stenciled letters saying things like ‘Run Dog Run’ or ‘Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids.’ The paintings captured the scary, euphoric mood of a high-flying period not unlike our own.”

In 1998, a retrospective of Wool’s work was mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, an exhibition which then traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland. In 2009 he had an exhibition at the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig in Koln, Germany and in 2012 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Wool is married to fellow artist Charline von Heyl.

(from wikipedia)

Mel Ziegler began his undergraduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, later transferring to the Kansas City Art Institute to complete his BFA in 1978. He earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1982. It was in Kansas City that he met Kate Ericson, his future artistic collaborator of 18 years. Together, Ericson and Ziegler made influential site-specific installations and objects concerned with mapping trajectories, questioning history, and highlighting the specificity of places and communities—all themes that had also been important for Ziegler in his early solo works. After the tragic and premature death of his partner Kate Ericson in 1995, Ziegler has continued to show works nationally and internationally. He earned a Loeb Fellowship for study at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 1996-97. In 2003, works from the previous ten years were shown in stuffed, a solo exhibition with an accompanying catalogue at the Galerie of the Secession, Vienna, Austria. He has exhibited and lectured extensively throughout the United States, Europe and South America.

Mel Ziegler has been one of the most consistent proponents of an expanded in-situ concept since the nineties. In his projects that are located in both exhibition spaces and urban spaces, he explores how the circumstances of public life and social space are reflected in the architecture and “design” of cities. At the same time, his work focuses on the question of the hidden historical and social-political manifestations of representation. In order to reveal and manipulate these, Mel Ziegler uses the most diverse materials to create complex reference systems, in which individual and collective history converge.

Heimo Zobernig’s work is structured as an examination and an expansion of two of the central tropes of twentieth century painting: the grid and the monochrome. His riffs on these themes spill out from his paintings – often classically modernist themselves in their square 100 × 100 or 150 × 150 cm formats – into sculptures, videos and room installations. Zobernig fundamentally subverts the high modernist ideal of the monochrome, compromising its aesthetic purity with the introduction of the decorative (Swarovski crystals on a white ground) the functional (the choma-key blue used in video editing) or the lightly comic.

Part of Zobernig’s studies were in set design and elements of mise-en-scène run through his work and inform the way in which he installs and exhibits it. He often uses fabric curtains or light to create monochromatic environments within which his works are installed. His sculptures, often minimal, playful or inquisitive, expand this monochrome field. Zobernig’s grid paintings, too, are ruptured and fractured, seeming to hold in balance both the rigorous logic of their structure and the random, broken lines which interrupt them.

Heimo Zobernig was born in Austria in 1958, and lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna from 1977-1980, and at the Hochschule fur Angewandte Kunst, Vienna from 1980-1983. He has exhibited extensively across the world, including recent solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunsthalle Zurich, Tate St Ives in Cornwall, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, CAPC, Musée d’art Contemporain, Bordeaux, and Essl Museum, Vienna.

The Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession was founded in 1897 and presented its first exhibition in 1898, the same year the new Secession building was completed to the designs of Joseph M.Olbrich.

Today, the Secession is the world’s oldest independent gallery devoted entirely to exhibitions of contemporary art. The exhibition programme of the Vienna Secession is decided by the members of the Board of the Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession on a democratic basis and selected entirely according to artistic criteria. One of the basic objectives of the Association is the presentation of current developments in Austrian and international art, as well as to cultivate an openness for experimentation.