9.2. – 5.3.2022
Attila Csörgő – Vadim Fishkin – Marcius Galan – IRWIN – Julije Knifer – Anne Neukamp –Marzena Nowak – Dan Perjovschi – Goran Petercol
With Arrivals, Galerie Charim warmly and collegially welcomes this exhibition project to its art space at Schleifmühlgasse 1a. Arrivals is a group exhibition by Gregor Podnar gallery, which also announces its arrival from Berlin to Vienna.
Arrivals is a reunion of artists, some of whom have been known to the Austrian art public for some time, such as Goran Petercol’s light objects, which were on view at Galerie Grita Insam in Vienna in the 1990s. Vadim Fishkin made the dome of the Vienna Secession glow with his heartbeat in 1996. Dan Perjovschi’s drawings appeared early in 2003 at the Graz Rotor and in 2005 at the Generali Foundation in Vienna and on the walls of the Lentos Museum in Linz…
Arrivals is a recollection of memory while at the same time looks towards the future. After increasing dominance of art fairs in the last two decades, the relative standstill of the culture industry in 2020/2021 and emerging digital markets, we ask ourselves again what role the gallery has as a place of encounter and art experience. With the change of location of a gallery in the internationally oriented art business, the degree of activity of the scene of a city or region is also measured anew.
Memories are an irreplaceable part of cultural and artistic creation, they help us to understand the world and to gain experience. A remedy for an overly retrospective, sometimes transfiguring view, however, is the poetic power of works of art, which often reaches beyond the written word. With Arrivals, the focus should consequently be on the works on display and their artists. This is how we arrived, to move on.
CHARIM, Schleifmühlgasse 1a, 1040 Vienna, Austria, Wed.- Thu. – Fri. 2 – 6 pm and by appointment
Attila Csörgő’s work explores the margin between art and science. The artist conducts thorough experiments with precise machines of his own design and optical apparatuses that reinforce his likewise epistemological and playful, humorous approach. His interests lie in optical illusions, metamorphoses of space into surface as well as hypnotic plays of light that touch upon mechanical movements and other inventions, where he combines imagination and a curiosity for various physical and mathematical phenomena.
Vadim Fishkin‘s works, though conceptual, are filled with wonder, humor and a sense of accessibility which he generously transfers to all who are fortunate enough to experience them. Each of his creations encourages us to question what we know about the world around us by contextualizing physical action and space while doing so with everyday objects and ideas. (A. J. Weissbard, 2009)
Since the beginning of the 2000s, Marcius Galan has been building a strong and diversified body of works that includes installations, sculptures, objects, drawings, videos, photos and conceptual projects. His austere and precise language is both intriguing and open to multiple interpretations, and it can be associated with several reference points from 20th century art history – from mid-century Brazilian neo-constructivism to the North American art of the 1960s. (Rodrigo Moura 2015)
The Slovenian artist group IRWIN consists of five painters and nonconformists who decided to collaborate in 1983 and have since collectively signed all their works with the name IRWIN. IRWIN works in a complex and subtle way with connections between art and ideology. Their work brings together art historical references, such as Romanticism, Modernism or the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, with symbols taken from religion or totalitarian political systems, for example from the Nazi era or from Soviet social realism. IRWIN has over time built a complex system of cross- references between their works and the works of other artists.
The meander is probably the most remarkable element in Julije Knifer’s (1924-2004) art. He arrived at it in a matter of years, by means of reducing and purifying forms, so that by 1960, his first Meanders appeared. Later on he explained that he had reached this form wishing to maximally reduce the shaping means so that he could attain his final goal – to create an anti-painting: “My primary goal was to make an anti-painting in a process of reduction of form and content. Because absurdity is for me a very specific form of freedom, in this process towards a certain form of anti-painting I went to absurdity. My whole work process is actually a stream without oscillations, with the aim to achieve monotony, which is the simplest and most expressive rhythm.”
If we wanted to systematically sum up the arsenal of forms, symbols, and design in Anne Neukamp‘s art, we might say that the artist takes us by the hand using familiar visual patterns from the everyday world of applied graphic design – low – and from the rather elitist art world of Minimalism and Conceptualism – high – only then to catapult us entirely into a no-man’s-land of unknown images and leave us utterly alone with our tools of perception. (Reinhard Spieler, 2019)
The work of Marzena Nowak is created from memory and imagination, residing somewhere in the tension between autobiographical reference points and poetically immersed dream worlds. Her sensitivity to everyday occurrences and the relation to her own physicality often represent the thematic departure points for her artistic practice. Nowak’s works play with the forms of sensory perception and picking out the interplay between the monotony of everyday life and human wish to escape into imagination, all set in a social, historical context of the political changes of the 1980s.
Since the 1970s Goran Petercol has been exhibiting works concentrating upon processualism, scopes, stylisation and subversion of the purity of conceptual structures. His artistic practice frequently examines the act of creation itself formulating a visual language where light and shadow are as important as the found objects often featured in his work. An example of this are in Petercol’s Sjene works where the shadow of the physical wire shares equal significance to the act of drawing an unbroken lineal form.