Museum exhibition

Heimo Zobernig: Chess painting

MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA
27 October - 31 December 2017

Since the 1980s, Vienna-based artist Heimo Zobernig (b 1958, Mauthen, Austria) has been working in sculpture, painting, installation, architecture, design, performance, and video. He has built a rigorous practice that continually pushes back against the tropes of Modernism and seeks to reorient the role of the artist, the institution, the audience, and the artwork itself. His work interrogates traditions in art history, driven by a curiosity for material and gesture, ultimately questioning the institutional mechanisms that support the exhibition of artwork. Zobernig uses the museum and its architecture as a stage; he allows a viewer to confront the constructed, at times theatrical, experience of visiting an art exhibition. Methods of display are exaggerated and upended, architecture and its purpose is flipped and rearranged. He seamlessly moves between installation and intervention, blurring the line between what constitutes a wall versus a stage, a painting versus a sculpture and in doing so, what constitutes an artwork.

Also included in the exhibition will be a recent hybrid catalogue-artist book, Books & Posters, a comprehensive overview of all the artist’s books, printed-matter editions, monographs, catalogues and posters designed and published by Zobernig since 1980.

The List Center show is Zobernig’s first solo institutional exhibition in the US since 1996. It follows his recent representation of Austria at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). Zobernig’s most recent solo exhibitions include Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2015); kestnergesellschaft in Hannover, Germany (2014); Mudam Luxembourg (2014); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2013); Palacio de Velázquez/Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (2012); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2011). He has been included in two earlier Venice Biennales (in 1988 and 2001), Documenta IX and X (in 1992 and 1997), and Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997).

Curated by Yuri Stone, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center; and Diana Baldon, independent curator. chess painting is an extension

For more information please visit MIT List Visual Arts Center.

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