Bruno Gironcoli, “Untitled”, 1996
Iron, wood, plastic 460 x 220 x 410 cm, Gironcoli Museum, Herberstein, © the Estate Bruno Gironcoli, Photo: Hans Christian Krass
Bruno Gironcoli. Prototypes for a new species. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frank¬furt presents ‘Bruno Gironcoli. Prototypes for a new species’, a thought-provoking exhibition with excerpts from Gironcoli’s monumental late oeuvre. February 14 to May 12, 2019.]]>
Source: Schirn Kunsthalle Frank¬furt
The Austrian artist is considered to be one of the most important sculptors of his generation. Beginning in the early 1960s, he drew on his never-ending inventive voracity to create a highly idiosyncratic and remarkable oeuvre rendered in a very personal and individual visual language. In groups of ever-new works, he continually succeeded in finding an unmistakable and yet surprising voice. Wire sculptures gave way to hollow-body forms, polyester objects, and disconcerting environments. Gironcoli’s work always focused on the individual and his abysses. The artist shared his existential questions and politically motivated avant-garde thought with fellow artists of the Viennese scene. His aesthetics of exorbitance and opulence constantly gave rise to excrescences and curlicues and have inspired numerous younger artists, including former students such as Franz West, Hans Schabus, or Ugo Rondinone.
In 1977, Gironcoli took over direction of the sculpture school of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. For the first time, he began to create sculptures that filled or frequently even defied space, made possible by the generous studio situation. As if derived from a theater of the absurd or a surreal dream world, the gigantic objects seem to be Prototypes for a new species, enveloped in shining, seductive surfaces of gold, silver, and copper. The Schirn is presenting a total of six of these sculptures—both inside and outside in the rotunda. Foreign and yet familiar, their organic forms and set pieces stem from an everyday culture that is often oriented toward the local: one soon believes to make out a wine barrel, an ear of wheat, or a vine. Then again, Gironcoli stages a strange march of infants or an imposing, ant-like sculpture. His magnificent and unsettling works never fail to surprise as postmodern pastiches.
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