Michael Kienzer

The Styrian artist Michael Kienzer works with the transformation of viewing habits, disrupting and dissecting them into aspects of description and vision, placing them in unusual circumstances that often seem to follow a strange or comical logic. His works take the audience on a journey that explores the seemingly self-evident construction of everyday knowledge. For his solo exhibition on the upper floor of the Kunsthaus Graz, he has integrated a large-scale sculpture that surveys and covers the room, where one could imagine the line of a drawing gone out of control or a billiard ball that has crashed into the room. The other related pieces, all sculptures made over the past few years, were adapted to fit into the new circumstances of the presentation. The sculpture goes beyond the usual formats of what can be visually grasped and shows a level of relativity with respect to viewer perspectives. Much like in the narrative reality of Gulliver’s Travels, the world is at once miniature and then large, both elusive and discrete. Here it appears as though the escalation of the sculpture is directly related to the presence of the viewer with respect to the surroundings.

Born in 1962 in Steyr, the artist Michael Kienzer, who in 2001 was awarded the Otto Mauer Prize and in 2000 the Art Prize of the City of Graz, has over the past 20 years developed one of the most important positions in Austrian contemporary art.

Kienzer’s works have already been shown in various exhibitions in Graz, for example as early as 1988 in a solo exhibition at the Neue Galerie, in 1994 with Manfred Erjautz at the University of Graz and in 1997 in the Stadtmuseum. The Kunsthaus Graz now for the first time presents a large-scale solo exhibition, inviting Kienzer to transform Space01 into different constructions of visual perception.

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.