Johannes Vogl
Wednesday 23 April - Friday 4 July 2008
Austrian Cultural Forum London
Private View: Tuesday 22 April, 2008 6-9pm
Johannes Vogl’s playful inventions are both humorous and functional, made from make-shift materials, they appeal to a universal sense of creativity. His first major public work, “5 moons”, has recently been installed at a building site in Vienna, shining moons on light boxes attached to cranes, mixing a sense of romance and visual trickery. For the Visual Arts Platform, Vogl will exhibit a collection of his artistic inventions.
The Story Cellar is a playground of ideas and innovations. In the basement gallery of the ACF Johannes Vogl presents a series of inventions which don’t so much present solutions for the world, as explore it, oscillating between functionality and fictive applications. As rain trickles down the only window, it is never clear if this constant precipitation that Vogl has engineered in his installation ‘One Week of Rain’ serves any other purpose other than to invoke a feeling of melancholy, while opposite, a film shows a slice of bread with jam on one side, perpetually rotating in slow motion, as if falling from a table. Whether the slice falls face up or down is only of concern to probability. As the bread continues to spin, forever suspending fate, and rain continues to fall, defying all meteorological logic, this cellar of experimentation illustrates how Vogl’s practice carefully observes the most mundane aspects of the everyday, providing them with a space for playful imagination. During his residency in London, Vogl will also create a new performance work, ‘30 Inch’. Simply, a figure stands on a child’s see-saw in a London park, balanced with a sack of sand on the other side. As the figure begins to ‘relieve himself’ and the body mass lessens, the figure rises. Mixing the light-hearted and the provocative, this work embodies the calculated naivety of Vogl’s work.
Johannes Vogl, born 1981 in Kaufeuren (Germany), lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. He is currently studying at the Academies of Fine Arts, vienna and Berlin-Weissensee and has exhibited widely with UTS Gallery, Sydney; Pudelcollection, Hamburg; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Brunswick a.o., and is represented by Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna. The Story Cellar is Vogl’s first solo exhibition in the UK.