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. This is a form of systems-immanent entropy, presented with a good deal of conceptual humor,.that itself becomes the subject of the exhibition. One key feature of Rock the Void is the grid pattern, as seen in the form of the mountings on the gallery walls, a row of right-angled showcases, and a series of cubic inserts.

For this personal exhibition at mumok, the Austrian artist 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. These works include the early sculptures, conceptual lists and text works, mathematically structured aluminum grids, as well as photographic panoramas of soccer stadiums, and Dabernig’s film works. We are showing both his new film River Plate (2013) and Hypercrisis (2011), which was nominated for the European Film Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2011. The show also presents Dabernig’s first film Wisla (1996), which gained wide international recognition.