Untitled (Flow)

The exhibition Untitled (Flow) gives a specific insight into Herbert Hinteregger’s singular approach to painting. At the heart of the exhibition is a flow of images made up of over sixty paintings done in the last fifteen years. The staging in form of a modular system was developed by Hinteregger in dialogue with the architecture of the hall at TAXISPALAIS, and forms a “float” – a discrete overall picture that does not occupy the walls, but seems to drift in the middle of the space. The installation uses the spatial setting of the hall with its glazed ceiling to create a choreography linking interior and exterior, far and near, and in place of the customary vertical hanging generates a horizontal flow. Turning the perspective round into a horizontal float questions patterns of perception in painting that are normally deemed indisputable, and creates new possibilities for the interaction between image and space. 

A central material basis for Hinteregger’s works is a variety of ball pen inks, which he acquires through a slow, obsessional procedure from thousands of ball pens. The painting process leads to opaque surfaces with a metallic shimmer, whose chemical composition lets the brushstroke vanish while retaining a painterly diffuseness. The consistency of the surface, in combination with support materials such as linen, jeans, tulle, wood and mirrors, produces specific ways of seeing images that enlist the movement of the light and shadows in the space as constitutional factors.

The stream of images emerging from the interaction of the individual works in the exhibition blends into a flickering wall installation consisting of thousands of empty ball pen barrels. Hinteregger’s all-over installation references the encompassing reach of mass production, while simultaneously undermining the mechanisms of our throwaway culture through his own system of re-evaluation and recycling: both the content and the housing of the simple, everyday ball pen he has appropriated, have equal status as the work’s artistic elements. 

Behind Untitled (Flow) is Hinteregger’s ceaseless work exploring the boundaries and potential of painting, especially in the dispositive of abstraction. Hinteregger’s personal grammar of abstraction, his utilisation and transposition of an everyday product, ball pen ink, from a vehicle for writing to a sensual pictorial medium, and the contextualisation of his image-space-installations, add a layer of indirect social and cultural references to his hermetic world of abstract compositions. Aspects such as diversity, horizontality instead of verticality, interconnectivity and complexity, individual adaptation and deceleration form an associative narrative frame that lends a subtle tinge to the individual pieces and the exhibition as a whole.

Curated by Jürgen Tabor