Secession presents Mathias Poledna an exhibition on view February 27–April 21, 2013.
Mathias Poledna’s work examines interconnections between art and entertainment, modernism in architecture and design, the language of film, and the history of exhibition making. The specific historical quality of these phenomena in particular constitutes a central point of departure. Most recently his art has often taken the form of highly condensed film installations through which a complex tension unfolds between what is presented and the concepts and cultural ideas circulating around it. The characteristic quality of Poledna’s approach is the concise employment of cultural connections and historical contexts in combination with repetition, displacement, condensation, and elision. In his filmic works the visceral effects of the projected image, the tension between image and sound, and the complex interweaving of popular music and filmic language are recurrent motifs. Time and again his precisely orchestrated interventions in the exhibition space, which are informed by his interest in the art of the 1960s and 1970s institutional critique, also shift constitutive and ephemeral elements of exhibition making—architecture, design, publications—from the periphery to the center of his practice.
Mathias Poledna, born in Vienna in 1965, lives and works in Los Angeles. He will represent Austria at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
Secession
Friedrichstrasse 12, 1010 Vienna
www.secession.at