Barbara Höller - SYSTEMS

18.4.2008 - 29.6.2008

Systems exploring image carriers and paint application

The same way Barbara Höller’s works can be clearly classified as painting and object art, her work is clearly related to her conceptional background. The final aesthetic product is the result of a system of intrinsic rules of the game in which practically no freedom is left for the artist, while a great deal of freedom is left to the material. What attracts the artist’s attention is the process of creation, creation as joint action of different forces, ideas, human potential and time, and the properties of material and space, upon the artist’s work.

Barbara Höller has a particular interest in the field of painting and the process of painting, which, for its part, is increasingly focused on the procedures of sculpture and object art. The mutual influence of image carriers, painting material and paint application is the topic of a series of her works, in which she has investigated this influence in a variety of ways in accordance with her terms of reference.

The exhibition in the Wannieck Gallery brings together in a single review the different pictorial systems Höller has developed over a period of almost 20 years.

Several older working series dating from 1994/1995 need to be seen afresh – those in which Barbara Höller deliberately used wood texture as a geometric visual motif and opposed it to the metallic layer of the paint. (JALOUSIE series, SAVE SYSTEM series)

Also on display are her famous hole pictures (2002) in which the paint soaks into hand made openings, producing the effect of fissures, hinting that the art of painting is growing old (the RISS series), or creating an impression of depth and planes in space through the use of thick acrylic (the FILL series).

Moving on to her more recent works, the exhibition presents the KANTEN (2005) series, which calls into question the concept of the background as the foundation of the picture by switching the frontal and the side view, giving a strong overall impression of space.

The SPIRALEN (2007) are a further example of Barbara Höller's systematic work with paint. Their materiality is transformed into strings and wound on "coils”. The graduation of paints underscores the circular movement within the objects.

Quite new are her foil works (the SACK series) which were made as castings from differently folded plastic foils and in which the function of the paint (acrylic) is exclusively that of a material. The only visible result of the process of work is the imprints of folded edges, which are arranged in systematic combinations, as is always the case in Barbara Höller’s work. The painting thus becomes a casting of the reality while at the same time "nothing but dried paint” (as Barbara Höller herself says).

Barbara Höller was born in Vienna in 1959. She was trained at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst from 1977 to 1984, and later studied mathematics at Vienna University. She won several awards in international competitions and lectured at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst in Vienna from 2002 to 2005. She is currently a freelance artist and a curator at the Haus der Künste in Vienna.


Opening of exhibition: 17.4.2008
Open daily except for Thursday, 18 April to 29 June 2008