Maria Lai’s First Collective Actions

in “Maria Lai. In the Interim”

as part of “Reciprocity”

2017

Edited by David Komary

Artists : Priscila Fernandes, Francesco Gennari, David Hanvald, Manuel Knapp, Maria Lai, Dóra Maurer, François Morellet, Michal Skoda, Jessica Stockholder, Gerold Tagwerker, Peter Tscherkassky, Dorota Walentynowicz

With texts by: Dieter Bogner, Silvia Eiblmayr, Lorenzo Giusti, David Komary

Two exhibitions at Galerie Stadtpark with François Morellet and Manuel Knapp as well as with Jessica Stockholder, David Hanvald and Priscila Fernandes stringently continue the earlier programme of curatorial juxtapositions of current-contemporary with established positions (previously Fred Sandback, Franz Erhard Walther, Bill Bollinger). The novelty of this catalogue and thus of the exhibitions it represents in the period from 2014 to 2016 is formed by solo exhibitions of contemporary but already canonised positions, such as those of Dóra Maurer and Maria Lai, which, like a window of time, are deliberately devoted exclusively to works from earlier decades. Reciprocity – in this the title functions as a programme – aims at possible relationships between the works less in the sense of closed entities or in the respective exhibition context than in the sense of aesthetic practices. The format of the book forms a space of interpictorial and intermedial references in which aesthetic, epistemic and discursive interferences emerge.