Hans Kupelwieser: Postmedial Sculpture, Austria

An interesting exhibition in Austria. Definately check out if you'll be in the Rhineland this summer.

Hans Kupelwieser: Postmedial Sculpture, Neue Galerie Graz Austria, 2004

Contemporary sculpture in its widest context is characterised by breaching conventional bounds in the fields of operation and material selection. The Austrian artist Hans Kupelwieser having studied under Bazon Brock and Peter Weibel at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna, has always worked mainly in the latter field. He includes new materials, not only as basic material for experimentation like in arte povera, but also operating with new meanings of the material in a kind of linguistic fashion.

This intertwining of material and operational enlargement between form and function is Hans Kupelwieser's field of analysis. In his current inflated sculptures, ("Gonflables"), of which one received a definite place in the Austrian Sculpture Park near Graz, the material is not formable PVC sheets but rather Aluminium. The material simulates a function that does not exist in reality. Illusions of material and function constitute an independent thread in the complex fabric of contemporary sculpture. Kupelwieser continues to develop this thread by making the sculpture ultimately float. .