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Kunsthaus Bregenz presents Florian Pumhosl Spatial Sequence

Kunsthaus Bregenz presents Florian Pumhosl Spatial Sequence on view 26 October 2012–20 January 2013.

Florian Pumhösl (born 1971, lives in Vienna) is a rarity in his generation of Austrian artists in having rigorously and cogently developed an independent abstract formal and pictorial language.

In addition to numerous solo shows in public museums in the past ten years, he has participated in many major art events, such as the São Paulo Biennale, the Venice Biennale, and documenta in 2007.

Florian Pumhösl’s central engagement with the historical formal vocabulary of modernism and its specific thematic issues is typical of his work. What interests him frequently is not only the genealogical derivation of a particular form, but also its social and political setting.

Florian Pumhösl will be presenting a new series at the Kunsthaus Bregenz titled ‘Spatial Sequence’, specially produced for the occasion. The work consists of plaster panels in three different sizes grouped in threes, the order of each trio beginning with the smallest and ending with the largest format.

The printing procedure involved goes back to the start of the nineteenth century when stamp-like printing dies were developed. A special feature of these dies, known in French as “cliché,” in English stereotype, was that they could be indefinitely reused.

The formal patterns of indigo blue that rhythmicize the plaster panels are no less important than how they are applied. Against the backdrop of Pumhösl’s interest in early Latin-American woven patterns and their reception by modernist artists, for instance, a discursive field opens up combining extra-European influences, the importance of design, and seriality in art. Seriality comes across especially clearly through the repetition of line patterns within a trio and the potential for reproducing the same by means of the cliché stamp.

Moreover, the line groupings on the individual panels, with their potential for musical interpretation, point to a central aspect of historical abstraction. And the positioning of the panels in space, the distances and open areas Pumhösl has set between them, also recall a time-based sequence and in this sense resemble a musical score.

Kunsthaus Bregenz
Karl-Tizian-Platz
6900 Bregenz, Austria
www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at