Nine Buildings, Stripped

Andreas Fogarasi’s art focuses on points of contact between visual culture—fine art, design, architecture—and social reality. What do society, politics, or history “look like”? Where and how do the basic parameters of our communities become apparent in the thoroughly human-made settings of our everyday lives? The city with its manifold surfaces is a central object of Fogarasi’s observations. Scrutinizing its ever-changing fabric, he analyses the emergence and visible expression of political, economic, cultural, and sociological deep structures.

Processes of urban transformation and their manifestations in surfaces are also at the heart of Nine Buildings, Stripped. Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz—itself a scene of architectonic transformation: Until early 2001, the site was occupied by a distinctive yellow container-like block, Kunsthalle Wien’s temporary first home—showcases newly produced sculptures for an exemplary study of the dynamics that characterize the transition of urban landscapes. Unassuming at first glance, Fogarasi’s presentation consists of wall-mounted and freestanding “material packages”: composed of original fragments of buildings that no longer exist and samples or parts of the visible exterior of the structures that replaced them (façade cladding, floor tiles, window and door elements, etc.), they offer radically abstract portraits, reduced to materiality, colours, and tactile qualities, of specific urban situations across time. Between image and sculpture, surface and depth, document and construct, they embody example cases of how we build and rebuild at given moments: material freeze-frames that capture the complexity of the city’s genesis in vivid tableaus.

Curator: Maximilian Geymüller