Josef Dabernig

The panorama has appeared in Josef Dabernig’s work since 1989. A ritual that has turned into somewhat of an obsession over the years, it serves the artist to question analogies of film and photography, of picture space and image area as well as the phenomenology of an object or place. In repetitively similar pictures Dabernig investigates sports fields with regards to their subtle nuances. Small shifts, irritations, different forms of vegetation, light conditions and decoration turn thus into props of a moving perception of culturally influenced places. Unlike 19th century panoramas the people in Dabernig’s project are not integrated into the place itself but regard the small-format pictures from outside, reading them. Hence the focus of interest in this panoramic photography lies not only in what we see, but also in what we do not see.

The Universalmuseum Joanneum is showing the exhibition at two different places in collaboration with the Diagonale 2013: in the Kunsthaus Graz it makes use of the Needle viewing room, and in the Neue Galerie Graz the reduced works are on show in the Round Room on the ground floor. Thus a dialogue is opened between architectural location and the photographic works.