Heimo Wallner
, in Art, Installation, Painting (1 Comments)
Heimo Wallner was born in Salzburg, Austria in 1961. He entered the Vienna Academy of Art in 1981 to study sculpture. After becoming involved in student politics, he abandoned the traditional “ivory tower” curriculum and opted, instead, to spend most of his time in the student office. His artistic practice explores the immediacy of drawing. He quickly sketches images onto paper that directly illustrate his stream-of-consciousness thought process. He is a co-founder of the Hotel Pupik (est 1999) artist in residence program in Austria, which hosts an annual art symposium, and is currently a visiting lecturer of studio art at Middlebury College in Vermont. His animated films and drawings have been exhibited extensively in museums and institutions between North America and Europe, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and he has held several artist residencies at American universities including the University of Texas and the Massachusetts College of Art.
Mao Tse Tung, Ausgewählte Werke, Band II (2001)
毛泽东选集-第二部
35mm colour film, 10 min.
Music: Martin Zrost
Mao Tse Tung, Ausgewählte Werke, Band II” is a ten minute color film that transforms the pages of a 1968 German-language, first edition of the Selected Works by Mao Tse-Tung Vol. II with the distinctive figurative drawings by Austrian artist Heimo Wallner. The film documents drawings with color pencil and fountain pen on each page, where the printed text gradually disappears beneath a figurative narrative of a 24 images per second, 16 loop cycle. Accompanied by the rhythmic beats by Martin Zorst, the film mesmerizes the viewer with evolving drawings that contemplates the linear process of information dissemination. The characters that evolve through the film challenge the viewer to search for visual connections as the original printed text is gradually obscured. Volume II specifically outlines the Great Helmsman’s’ ideas on “The Period of the War of Resistance Against Japan” and as these words are translated, repeated and disseminated, Wallner’s’ film compounds an enshrouding layer of meaning through his visual narrative. The work is part of an ongoing series using each book in the five volume series as a foundation for artistic exploration, produced with literal undertones of political musings.
Artist Statement: “In a way it is my struggle to make sense of something so clearly written,so easily understood, so linear, so horrifyingly consequential! I consider myself very much as a political being and clearly a political being of the left and it is astounding to me how the human animal continuously manages to screw upinthebiggestpossibleways(oftenwiththebestintentions).Idont’ think that my work is political first and foremost, it is more a visceral response to what I encounter, using stupidity (or to tone it down a bit: the disability to grasp the complex chain of cause and effects) to probe the world.”
Chinese Diary-Beijing (2007)
北 京日记
Ink on paper
30 x 22 cm / 11 3/4 x 8 3/4 in
Unique Portfolio of 200
These unique drawings are part of a large portfolio of daily interpretations made during the artists’ travels to Beijing in 2007. Heimo Wallner employs an “automatic” sketching technique, a frame-by-frame, subconscious repetition where one image follows the next in an endless cycle which lacks a narrative of any kind. The figures of a man with empty eye slits caught in moments of fervent action describe a kind of feral everyman–uninhibited, vulgar, and violent, bent on self-destruction. The energy harnessed in these drawings, is typical of Wallner’s art and also capture a specific sense of primal urgency observed by the artist during his visit to China.
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ART . RedBox Studio .cn – Do a Book: Group exhibition and installation at White Space, Beijing
[...] 掉对 Out, 庆庆 Qingqing, Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze, Rirkrit Tiravanija, 曾建華 Tsang Kinwah, Heimo Wallner, 王超 Wang Chao, Terry Winters & Ben Marcus, 徐冰 Xu Bing [...]