Josef Dabernig

A love of order and minimalism, rationalistic obsession, and a drive toward planned structures all seem to determine the scenery chosen by artist and filmmaker Josef Dabernig (born 1956 in Kötschach-Mauthen) for his first comprehensive retrospective exhibition in a museum. The ostentatious tidiness of this show is, however, again and again unsettled by many kinds of subtle irritation and anomaly. For this personal exhibition of his works, Dabernig has designed an architecture that extends over three exhibition levels and by means of which he can place the different blocks of his work in relation to each other. His show entitled Rock the Void will present Dabernig’s lists, his conceptual text works, and mathematically structured aluminum grids and panoramas of football stadiums, alongside film works, including his most recent film River Plate (2013), the film Hypercrisis (2011), which was nominated at the 2011 Venice Film Festival for the European Film Prize, and Wisla, Dabernig’s ode to soccer (1996), the artist’s first film, which received enthusiastic international acclaim.