October 04 – November 16 2024
Online Only

Presented in close collaboration with Harald Bichler of Galerie Rauminhalt (Space & Content), and in tandem with Bernhard Hausegger’s Weitere Überschüsse (More Surplus), October 04 – November 11 at Galerie Rauminhalt in Vienna, Austria.

Marta is honored to announce and present Doppelgänger, an online-only exhibition of paintings and chairs by Vienna-based artist Bernhard Hausegger. This selection of two- and three-dimensional works, arranged as diptychs, or doubles, as the German etymology of the show’s title implies, centralizes the dual focus of Hausegger’s practice and his expressions—articulation, then deconstruction, and then reconfiguration—of form.

As if through memory, the artist’s paintings render architectural spaces, illustrative figures, and their accessories with phantasmal precision—their outlines a simultaneous apparition and disappearance. Hausegger’s large-scale canvases allow for expansive yet reduced treatments of his visual worlds, many of which are populated with inhabitants whom we find vaguely familiar; the shape of a pair of shoes perhaps triggering the fleeting recognition of a character from a popular comic or animation. Within the artist’s often desolate landscapes, an ominous optimism recurs, augmented by the relationship between color and form. A bright coral knoll gently rises beneath a disembodied hand wielding an abbreviated ax while the turquoise grip of a pistol rests downward, as if holstered, the danger of its barrel diminishing in silhouette. These scenes, from two untitled paintings, and their concurrent location and dislocation, emphasize Hausegger’s fluid treatment of time and perspective—an eternalism that suggests the coexistence of past, present, and future events.

Extending from wall to floor, the artist’s chairs present under a similar guise. These historic designs, collected or received from various sources, are minimally altered, covered with polyester resin, and then painted to both maintain and obscure their original structures, the result of which offers us seating works as projection surfaces for corrections. The ‘skins’ that Hausegger utilizes in this process both reinforce and conceal the lineage of form and result in their orientation as generative objects with synchronous histories—the moment of recognition ascribed to the interrogation of form, its appearance, and our recollection thereof.

—

Doppelgänger is the gallery’s inaugural remote / online exhibition, and looks specifically to Vienna as a sister city to L.A., illustrated historically in transatlantic relationships like those of Rudolph Schindler and the Museum of Applied Arts (Museum für angewandte Kunst), or MAK. This is the first presentation in the gallery’s notional and embryonic Paintings & Chairs program.

About the Artist

Bernhard Hausegger (Austrian, b. 1957) lives and works in Vienna. Hausegger studied sculpture under Bruno Gironcoli at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. This is the artist’s first exhibition in Los Angeles, his first in the US, and his first with Marta. Doppelgänger is presented in collaboration with Rauminhalt Harald Bichler, who represents Hausegger’s work globally. Of Hausegger’s work, the academic Sabine Dortschy writes — “Sometimes the figurative is reduced to fragments of bodies or silhouettes that try to locate themselves within brightly colored rooms. But it’s not easy; perspectives shift effortlessly in the image, both anchoring and permeating the figures ... It is difficult to determine what is foreground or background here ... A man sketched with a few strokes reaches out with an oversized hand that seems to liquefy mysteriously. What could he have touched before?”

About Rauminhalt

Harald Bichler founded Galerie Rauminhalt (Space & Content) in Vienna in 2003. Uniquely in Austria, the gallery exhibits work that questions the conventional distinction between art, design, architecture, and science. “Where disciplines intersect, opportunities arise to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the world,” says Bichler. The gallery supports artists whose work introduces a refreshing change of perspective on our relationship to objects. In regular solo and group exhibitions, current artistic positions are presented with this tension in mind, and the possibilities of dissolving the boundaries of various cultural fields are put up for discussion from different perspectives.

Galerie Rauminhalt
Schleifmühlgasse 13
A-1040 Vienna, Austria