Belvedere 21

JOSEF BAUER
Demonstration
5 September 2019 - 12 January 2020

Curated by Harald Krejci.

With this exhibition on Josef Bauer, the Belvedere 21 is showcasing a visionary approach that has hardly been recognized in the international art world. Bauer has been one of the principal protagonists of Conceptual Art in Austria since the 1960s. In the milieu of the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group) with the poets Gerhard Rühm, Friedrich Achleitner, and Oswald Wiener, he develops a—in the truest sense of the word—sculptural language that makes a connection between bodies and objects.

The Upper Austrian Concept Artist describes his work as “tactile poetry.” His installations, paintings, objects, and performance photographs always revolve around the question of what can be articulated with art and how. Bauer is interested in combining text, image, and writing in a single language. For him, art and exhibiting constitute an entity, a “language in the space.” To this end, the artist works with suggestion and always establishes new intersections to keep the content topical. The dual meaning of the exhibition’s title, Demonstration, refers on the one hand to the gesture of presenting, on the other to the expression of political protest—two themes that play a major role in Bauer’s oeuvre.