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Photo: Foto Otto 1 image
Untitled
Herwig Kempinger
C-print on acrylic glass
208 × 123 cm (framed)
1992
Acquisition 1997
Inv. No. 0024
Herwig Kempinger works on a new definition of the terms painting, sculpture and photography in the virtual spaces of immateriality. His photos, sealed behind acrylic glass, negotiate the disappearance of the object in favour of a colour space defined by light. An inexplicable, intensive light approaches from out of a suggestive darkness and hangs in space emitting a quiet vibrato. Kempinger develops an aesthetic of dematerialisation – transcendence of space linked with the concrete visual facts and references of an artificial and supernatural reality.
The radical nature of his artistic position lies in restructuring the idea of the importance of abstraction, per se. He shows that the photographic surface has its own validity, and that the gaze into the void behind it is a look into an ambivalent reality between subjective perception and objective experience. The puzzle picture of spaces here and beyond, concrete and abstract, place us in a an irritating condition of insecurity somewhere between truth and falsity.
Brigitte Huck, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)
Continue readingExhibitions
On To Something New. Three Decades from Schiele to Schlegel from private collections, Landesgalerie Niederösterreich, Krems, 2021
Herwig Kempinger. Digital Sky and Flat Space, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, Linz, 2007
There is something you should know. Die EVN Sammlung im Belvedere, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 2000
Publications
Auf zu Neuem. Drei Jahrzehnte von Schiele bis Schlegel aus Privatbesitz [on the occasion of the exhibition “On To Something New. Three Decades from Schiele to Schlegel from private collections”, Landesgalerie Niederösterreich, March 27th 2021 – February 6th 2022], Weitra 2021, p. 138
Herwig Kempinger. Digital Sky and Flat Space, , p. 190
evn sammlung 95–05, Cologne 2005, p. 175
evn sammlung. Ankäufe 1995 – 1996, Maria Enzersdorf 1997, p. 23
Context
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from 1992
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non-objective photography