Stephanie Pflaum is an Austrian painter whose artistic practice is characterised by assemblages enriched with evocative, movable pieces that can occasionally burgeon into space-consuming environments. For the tresor of the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien Pflaum is designing an enchanted living room with an individual mythological and symbolic horizon. At once dream configuration and place of refuge, the “room within the exhibition room” invites us to follow a trail, makes the environment into a walk-on stage in which the awareness of art and awareness of oneself melt together, reminiscent of forerunners of Environment Art and the happenings of the nineteen-sixties and –seventies and harking back to Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau of the twenties. In front of the counterfoil of the neutral white cube the rampant abundance of materials and memory stories unfold into a “world landscape” which is difficult to decipher, which reflects life between the charged polarities of Eros and death, beauty and decay, construction and deconstruction: remnants of a private living room commingle with objets trouvés of everyday use, profane and holy, the apparently real with the obviously artificial. Whether anatomical models, furniture fragments, masks, children’s clothes, books, burnt pictures or plastic flowers: everything is covered with a veil of white plaster, placing the objects in all their heterogeneous diversity into relationship with each other.

Curator: Heike Eipeldauer
 

Opening: May 21 2014, 7.30pm

Free entry