Hans Kupelwieser. Photograms

(The following are excerpts from the above text, which can be read in full in: Exhib.-cat.: "Hans Kupelwieser. Fotogramme", Kunsthandel Giese & Schweiger, Vienna 2023, p. 4 ff., see also menu item "Catalogue" on this page).

It would be much too short-sighted to call Hans Kupelwieser a sculptor. Although sculpture and photography are his preferred techniques, he is guided and driven exclusively by the idea, the concept. "Looking like" that is a quintessence: Rainer Metzger has characterized Kupelwieser's œuvre as one "that looks like sculpture or also like photography, but that is in fact and above all pure Conceptual Art."

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Kupelwieser's artistic work always has the ambition to challenge the sensory apparatus of the viewer, above all, of course, the sense of sight. His artistic work includes photograms -cameralessly produced photographs - which can take not only image but also object form, as well as sculptures made of steel, aluminum, plexiglass, textile and furniture, installations with mirrors, magnifying glasses, plastic and typography or text.

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In 1981 Hans Kupelwieser participated with several photographic works in the almost legendary exhibition "Erweiterte Fotografie - Extended Photography", which took place in the Vienna Secession and was curated by Peter Weibel and Anna Auer. The potential for manipulation of the image and the arbitrarily shifting reference to reality become apparent even in this early work. Here, Hans Kupelwieser already distills facets of enigma and irony from a commodity.

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The expansion, extension of the medium of photography and the experimental handling of it characterize Kupelwieser's artistic work. He shares the idea of "post-media sculpture" with an entire generation of artists, including Gerwald Rockenschaub, Eva Schlegel, Michael Kienzer, and Erwin Wurm. The term goes back to Peter Weibel, who postulated: "all disciplines of art have been changed by the media. [...] therefore all art is postmedial."

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Hans Kupelwieser moves between media and genres, leaving unanswered the question of which technique or -ism he now belongs to. Of course, his artistic work unfolds with the help of various techniques, first and foremost those of sculpture and photography. But more revealing than this fact seems to me the ease with which Hans Kupelwieser unites contradictions and bridges trenches that are torn open by the paradoxical pressure to assign artists to a technique. This staying in motion, this agility says a lot about an oeuvre that has received far too little attention in Austria and is looking for a comparison internationally.

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A fine sensorium for contemporary issues and discourses are evident in many of Hans Kupelwieser's works.

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Anish Kapoor, Martin Creed or even Gerhard Richter come to mind, all three of whom challenge our sense of sight in their œuvre just as Hans Kupelwieser does, which is a particular challenge in times when all eyes are glued to digital screens and hardly drift away from them. In the 21st century, Hans Kupelwieser's art is a sustained plea for a sharpening of our perception and, using highly original processes and techniques, explores an everyday life that, loosely based on Roland Barthes, is full of myths.

(Dr. Lisa Ortner-Kreil is curator at the Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna.)