In Never Happy enough, Jari Genser reflects on loneliness in the creative process. By interweaving romanticized depictions of the outside world, the artist deals with the themes of seeing and being seen as well as the feeling of being trapped in pictorial worlds. In order to illustrate the complex mechanisms of interaction between the inside and the outside, Genser created a space within a space - the in-situ installation Noasis.
The accessible column with mirrored windows seems to offer refuge from social interactions. But there is a trap lurking behind the shielding facade: the mirrored glass has an integrated spy function that subjects the people inside to voyeuristic gazes. At a time when social media and other digital platforms enable omnipresent surveillance, Genser raises the question of the accessibility of true relaxation.
Text: Esther Mlenek
Photos © Jari Genser
In his works, Jari Genser reflects on what he perceives on a daily basis. Repetition as a diary-like reference and stylistic device characterises his picture-in-picture works. He is inspired by literature, his travels or current events in the media. Guided by the artist's attentive gaze, the viewer opens up interior and exterior spaces to be explored.
Photos © Jari Genser
Wonderland – this is the title of Jari Genser's Gallery Statement at Galerie 422, inviting visitors to submerge themselves in his picture-in-picture worlds and experience his installation as an immersive experience. In a conversation with Marlene Poeckh (Galerie 422), Jari Genser reveals more about the project, his picture-in-picture idea and the significance of houseplants in his works.
Photos © Jari Genser
Galerie Leuenroth,
Frankfurt am Main (DE)
Group exhibition
with Anya Triestram
and Janosch Dannemann
27.1. – 11.3.2023
Home is the place you come from, the house you grew up in, the room you live in right now, the space you work in, the place you return to or remember most fondly ...?
This exhibition shows works by Janosch Dannemann [Leipzig] and Jari Genser [Vienna], two young positions, together with new works by Anya Triestram [Leipzig/Vienna]. They are different perspectives on and into spaces, views from the outside in or from the inside out, and they show what can be grasped from one point to another. There are rooms and tents, curtains and windows, objects and all kinds of furniture. Rarely do people enter the scenery. A few dogs are here and there. Moods can be read and whether it is raining or the sun is shining can be guessed. Sometimes you even see the same view in different weathers. It is real, fantasized and collaged stages and rooms, it is one's own studio or a foreign one, it is the apartment, it is details or larger cutouts on orders in corners, which one can enter and look at. No matter what assumptions are made about these places - for the duration of this exhibition, the paintings are at home in the Leuenroth Gallery.
Text and idea: Anya Triestram (translated)
Photos © Galerie Leuenroth
The Annual Exhibition Exhibition Was fehlt [What is missing] takes the curatorial concept as distributed to the invited artist members and transforms this into a question about voids—whether political, social, spatial or in the imagination. If we examine the artistic contributions to the exhibition, we find means of dealing with abandoned buildings and things, with memories, longing and other unexpected life plans, as well as with topics of mutual support, environmental awareness and the endurance of indeterminacy. Since many of the suggestions do not fit into an either-or, Was fehlt becomes less an answer to the initial question than a stimulus to further thinking.
Artists at Salzburger Kunstverein: Michael Dietrich, Bartosz Dolhun, David Eisl, Gabriele Fulterer & Christine Scherrer, Jari Genser, Gruppe 19, Isabella Heigl, Daniel Hüttler, Violeta Ivanova, Eginhartz Kanter, Christel Kiesel, Margareta Klose, Catherine Ludwig, Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer, Isabell Rauchenbichler, Sophie Stadler, Borjana Ventzislavova, Georg Zenz.
Artists at Museumspavillon: Rosa Andraschek, Stella Bach, Katharina Gruzei, Bernhard Hetzenauer, Felix Pöchhacker, Elisabeth Schmirl, Luz Olivares Capelle, Nadine Weixler
In public space: Motahar Amiri
Curated by Maximilian Lehner in conversation with Kirila Cvetkovska und Tia Čiček.
Photos © Andrew Phelps
Confort Mental,
Paris (FR)
Group exhibition
with Alja Piry,
Georg Pinteritsch,
Samira Saidi
and Peter Schreiner
22. – 26.10.2022
(Opening 21.10.2022)
The exhibition project Through The Spectacle brings together five artistic positions that could not be more different. What unites them is that their creators met as "Artists in Residence" in 2021 at the Cite international des Arts Paris. The decision to show the works created on site in a group pushes the artists’ positions, which are located between painting, experimental text work, photography and new media, into a close relationship, which - despite their common genesis - they do not actually have. And yet, connections inevitably arise. While Jari Genser’s paintings deals with his living and work space in Paris, Samira Saidi makes historical works of art the starting point for her exploration and reinterpretation of Afro-European pioneer women of the 18th and 19th centuries. In her video work, Alja Piry places the colloquial term „Unkraut“ (weed) in a specific literary context, and Georg Pinteritsch brings abstract bodies and objects into a strange relationship of tension with their distorted surroundings. As his images refer to alchemical representations suggesting a hidden order of things, Peter Schreiner makes use of the rules of a well-known game of skill to create a random portrait of the city of Paris.
Photos © Peter Schreiner
One work - one viewer.
ONExONE is a room installation that may only be entered individually. It is made for one work and for one person.
It is a confrontation at eye level. A situation in which nothing is predetermined. Exchange or demarcation, dialogue or ignoring each other, intimate or impersonal: you do not decide alone.
When you look into a depth, the depth also looks into you.
Photos © Jari Genser
"Transparency" - a promise with which politics and business like to advertise, but which is rarely kept. In times of treacherous chat protocols, the term takes on a new dimension. Some works in the exhibition deal with the "independence" of the media, others with appearance and reality. How much of a life of their own do processes have? How does our perception change when familiar objects suddenly appear to us in a different light?
In a curatorial experimental arrangement, works by different generations of artists will enter into dialogue and established mechanisms of the art market will be questioned. Authors and details are deliberately faded out in the presentation and thus all participants are placed on the same level. Does this free the focus on the work? Is the focus finally on the essential? OPAK is thus a low-threshold experimental arrangement that perhaps opens up the art market to those who feel deterred by the prevailing elitist information policy.
Photo © Jari Genser
Group show with works by Abiona Esther Ojo, Egor Urakov, Federico Vecchi, Haruko Maeda, Jari Genser, Lena Kuzmich, Linda Berger, Paul Robas, and Petra Schnakenberg.
The group exhibition Heady Days is the result of the cooperation between the association Les Nouveaux Riches for contemporary art and culture and the gallery Elektrohalle Rhomberg. Through nine multifaceted artistic positions, it invites visitors to leave behind and go beyond the boundaries and limitations of their respective realities and perceptions thereof. Some of the works shown have been created specifically for the exhibition, while others were chosen from the artists’ existing oeuvre. Owing to the diversity of artistic approaches, the exhibition comprises a great variety of media ranging from painting, sculpture, multimedia installations to miniature models and mosaics.
Text: Elektrohalle Rhomberg, 2021.
Photos © Andrew Phelps
Galerie Rudolf Leeb,
Salzburg (AT)
Group exhibition with
Magdalena Kreinecker
and Hessam Samavatian
30.1. – 3.4.2020
(Opening 29.1.2020)
The exhibition Raumblenden deals with the dispositif of space and its constitution. What possibilities are there for representing spaces and how do artistic procedures simultaneously intervene in the concealment or blinding of spaces or allow certain lines of sight and not others? [...]
Like photography, painting also determines the ways in which spaces are viewed. Although painting once served as a direct means of depicting nature or the surrounding space, photography has been introduced here for 180 years as an intermediate stage that establishes visual contact with spatial structures and replaces real vision with a medial one. Painting is thus no longer considered the primary means of expression of art, but has to face other media in order to allow new ways of looking at reality. On the other hand, this reflexive attitude leads to spaces being nested as modules and robbed of the free view. Layers and superimpositions or apertures interlock and reference a virtual world that attempts to penetrate from a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional dimension.
Text: Walter Seidl, curator of the exhibition (translated)
Photos © Anna Sophia Rußmann & Jari Genser
In the series Good Titles for Artworks, Jari Genser reflects on the problem of giving titles to completed artistic works. Already on the level of typeface, Genser's slogan-like painted questions and statements begin to unfold an irritating effect. In terms of content, the text images scattered in the room and hanging on the wall pose questions about our (un)fulfilled ideas of freedom.
The contact with propositions, advice and imperatives moves now and then proverbially comfortably between black and white in life phases and democratic decision-making situations. Sayings and slogans thereby bypass discursive practice and, through their opinionated command structure, distance themselves from the desirable ideal state of communicative reason. All kinds of philosophical slogans, e.g. "tit for tat", "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", replace through their superficiality the give and take of reasons in the convoluted structures of elaborate negotiation processes; simple messages are supposed to shine above the thicket of the forest of opinions.
Not to trust this black and white thinking recommends Jari Genser's curvaceously drawn and intertwined text images. The paths of reading and understanding move on manifold routes through his painted proverbial dictionary, the flow of reading sometimes seems to jam and cascade into the deep structure of the sentences, sloping cliffs and embankments unsettle puffed-up opinions. The graphically executed text confronts the viewer first and suddenly on a sensual level, opening up a brief temporal interlude a scant moment before legibility and therein a space for the aesthetic treatment of the sentences painted on by Genser.
Text: Nikolaus Kohlberger (translated)
Photo © Jari Genser
Participating Artists: Alexandra Baumgartner, Angelika Wienerroither, Anja Ronacher, Christiane Peschek, Csaba Fürjesi, Elisabeth Schmirl, Erich Gruber, Florian Nährer, Georg Frauenschuh, Jari Genser, Johanna Binder, Johannes Steidl, Jonas Geise, Lavinia Lanner, Margareta Klose, Martina Mühlfellner, Stefan Heizinger, Stefan Kreiger, Tina Hainschwang, Ulrich Nausner and Zoe Vitzthum
Elektrohalle Rhomberg invited Séamus Kealy to curate an exhibition and select a group of artists to present their work.The only criterion: every artist should have a relationship to Salzburg.
The result is an exhibition of over twenty artists from different media with the title “Fortress of Salt”. The theme of the exhibition itself is the imaginative translation of the city of “Salzburg” into the english language. Rather, the concept of a fortress made of salt is illustrated, which itself leads to several associations. One tries to address issues such as the fragility of civilization in general (both historical and contemporary), the passage of time, the impact of the crisis on larger structures, the dissolution of ideas, even philosophy, and also in response to political pressure (be it political or not) from the outside. In fact, however, it also represents the dissolution of something robust that appears susceptible to the effects of external forces.
Using this metaphor, Séamus Kealy has selected over twenty artists, each of whom react freely and individually to this topic through their work. The gallery is divided into several sections, each of which provides its own frame and at the same time increases / opens up from the whole.
Text: Elektrohalle Rhomberg, 2020.
Photos © Andrew Phelps
Works of the candidates: Sarah Bildstein, Jari Genser, Lena Göbel (prize winner), Julia Gutweniger, Matthias Lautner, Drago Persic, Georg Pinteritsch, Gregor Pirker, Florian Schmidt, Martin Steininger.
The prize, named after the famous Salzburg painter Anton Faistauer (1887 - 1930), has been awarded by the province of Salzburg for over 45 years. It is awarded alternately with other awards in the field of fine arts every three years and is endowed with € 7,000.
The call for entries for this is made throughout Austria for artists under the age of 40. The age limit is justified so that young positions can always be presented in the exhibition and new talents can be discovered.
The jury consists of: Doris Theres Hofer, prize winner 2017, Dr. Gerda Ridler, art historian, director of the OÖ Landesmuseum until 2017, and Mag. Günther Oberhollenzer, curator Landesgalerie Niederösterreich, Kunstmeile Krems.
In a 1st session on June 3, the jurors selected from the 80 submissions (which consisted of catalogs, photographs and texts) the 10 contenders for the exhibition in the Landesgalerie im Traklhaus.
In another session, which will take place directly in the exhibition, in front of the originals, jury will choose from these painters the prize winner.
Photos © Rudolf Strobl
Kunstraum SUPER,
Wien (AT)
Group exhibition
with Simon Goritschnig
and Anna Schmoll
28.11. – 4.12.2020
In the middle of the 19th century, the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel crossed different pea varieties and thus showed how genetic traits are inherited. Simon Goritschnig and Jari Genser did not so much want to test Mendel's rules for their correctness as to make them tangible for themselves and others. Their experiment, which moves between art and science, explores the question of whether artists are also suitable as botanists.
Photos © Simon Goritschnig
Periscope,
Salzburg (AT)
Group exhibition
with Marion Reisinger
12.4. – 4.5.2019
A subjective history inscribes itself as a moment of memory in all of the works presented, and all of them are concerned in different ways with preserving it. What they have in common is that the materiality of memory takes on a central role, on the one hand as the works' passage into the living space, but on the other hand also material as changeable, enduring, or as the embodiment of transience.
Subjective memory spaces emerge masked in reference structures of different temporal levels or materialities. The memories inscribed in the works are united by the notion that they seem to be stored for a special moment that one does not yet know about, an open future in the ideal sense. Possibly, however, one knows just as little where the memory has its origin or whether it is a memory at all that we perceive. Perhaps this will become clear on a rainy day.
Text: Maximilian Lehner (translated)
Photo © Jari Genser
Junges Wort, junge Kunst, junge Szene, Junge Junge. Der Jugendstil feiert seinen hundertsten Geburtstag, die jungen Wilden haben weder Jugend noch Stil. Alt sind sie geworden. Aber so wird es uns allen ergehen. Wenn wir Glück haben.
Text published in: Anita Thanhofer (Ed.) (2019), Junges Wort. Broschüre zur Ausstellung.
People Want / We All Need was a site-specific installation that was conceptualized for the exhibition Junges Wort (Young Word) in 2019. The main topic was art as a possibility for resistence against the instrumentalization by economical interests. Formally the installation consisted of a series of text works that constrained themselves to the colours black and white (or light and shadow).
The installation consisted of the hanging sculpture People Want Positive Messages But Art Is Not Adver- tising (2017) and several wall paintings in combination with found objects. These works could be found in several rooms of an (abandoned) former brewery building. They could be seen from different angles and under different lighting conditions, thus integrating the space into the work.
People Want Positive Messages But Art Is Not Advertising addresses an issue that is relevant when exhibit- ing art, especially in the public domain: Art should transmit positive, life-affirming messages. By hanging the installation in front of a hole in the wall, the black letters almost disappear, leaving only People Want Art Not Advertising.
Art is a sphere of life where negative thoughts and feelings can be expressed. Art does not have to please anyone. That does not mean that it can or should not transmit positive messages, but art must not serve the interests of an industry that systematically tries to influence people. In the early 20th century that has been called propaganda, nowadays it is called advertising. I do not want to have to do anything with that.
The second part of the installation is called We all need and adresses the capacity of art to break up rigid systems: We all need a little more chaos. This is a reference to the chaos in which I found the pieces of styrofoam that I used to carve the letters. In a time where algorithms are used to transform our consum- ing habits into money the refusal to be categorized is an act of rebellion.
As an artist you are often told that it is necessary to advertise one’s work. But if all I do is only advertising for myself that makes me less that I am. And I make art precisely to express what I cannot be - to be more than I am.
Photo © Jari Genser
Sewon Art Space,
Yogyakarta (ID)
Solo exhibition
Opening 12.9.2018
Cats for Gustav
Magic for Albrecht
Umbul-Umbul for me
CM&U2 is a multimedial installation that consists of works I created during an Artist Residency in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. It includes my version of Gustav Klimt’s photo with his cat, a variety of works from the series Melencolia I.o (a wooden cube, prints, paintings and photos) and of course the world-famous Umbul-Umbul that adorn Indonesia’s streets each August 17th (installed on bamboo branches from the backyard).
Sometimes it’s hard to separate life and work, life and art, life and... anything.
Photo © Jari Genser
SaRanG Art Space,
Yogyakarta (ID)
Solo exhibition
20.8. – 10.9.2018
Dear friends,
I cannot bear it any longer. Not because of my insomnia or my chronic anxiety. It is because of art.
Because of what they call art. Two weeks ago I have been to Paris and visited the Fondation Louis Vuitton. They let me in for free. That was nice. But the exhibition. An Art-Disneyland. Works by the most renowned artists of our time. Art reduced to design. Luxury handbags, Luxury art. Exchangeable. Soulless.
The starting point for my art is sometimes love, more often despair. I cannot promise what I do is good. I cannot even promise it is authentic. But I can, in all humility, say that my work is meaningful to me. That I have spent my time, my thoughts and my feelings on it. My life. So yes, it is kind of a sentimental journey.
A journey that I hope will lead towards a new sensibility. They say anything can be art, but in the end art is always just what they approve. It has never been about what is art and what is not. It is about the feeling. The teddy bear that has been loved to rags by its owner is more valuable than those shiny objects that repulse any feelings.
Let’s start again. Once more with feeling. Do not try to protect yourself, make yourself vulnerable. The times where anything can be art are over.
I want real feelings. I want real art.
(Text inspired by Araki Nobuyoshi, A Sentimental Journey)
Photo © Jari Genser
This year’s annual member’s exhibition opens just ahead of Mary‘s conception on the Catholic calendar. The exhibition theme “Purity in Imperfection” playfully refers to this day and its associations, and invites artists to consider notions of purity, impurity, perfection and
imperfection as these topics might arise in their work.
Almost all genres of art will be shown, from painting, drawing, photography, installation and video. Seventeen artists invite you to discover and even acquire their artwork.
Artists: Alexandra Baumgartner, Christian Ecker, Gertrud Fischbacher, Jari Genser, Renate Hausenblas, Stefan
Heizinger, Eginhartz Kanter, Isabella Kohlhuber, Reinhart Mlineritsch, David Muth, Lilo Nein, Olena Newkryta, Simona Obholzer, Christiane Peschek, Felix Pöchhacker, Psyschwestern, Ingrid Schreyer
Curatorial Jury: Karolina Radenković (Leitung 5020), Tina Teufel (Kuratorin MdMS), Gerold Tusch (Künstler, Vorstandsmitglied Salzburger Kunstverein)
Photos © Andrew Phelps
For the resistance of art not to disappear into its opposite, the unsolved tension between the two resistances cannot but remain. Jacques Rancière
Art is the cream in our coffee and the spanner in the works of our society. Salzburg’s history and its wealth demonstrate that economy and art cannot exist without each other. And yet―or exactly for this reason―there is always tension between art and society. 33 contemporary artists react to the ambivalences of our society and the resistance offered by materials, while also providing a place for an exchange of opinions. In their works, they experiment and research, they analyse, dismantle, reflect, mount and recombine, intensify and create new images.
The Salzburger Kunstverein’s annual exhibition is a tradition that emerged from the original founding principles of this organisation in 1844, like that of other Kunstvereins. They emerged parallel to the development of the modern male “exhibition artist” (at this time, women were not permitted in the academies and salons). Kunstvereins, seen in this context, represented artists, as they themselves were often groups of artists as well as funders. In this case, the Salzburger Kunstverein had an original mission to facilitate “the mediation and sale of contemporary art from the countries of the monarchy and the neighboring foreign countries.”
Artists: Julia Amelie, Maurizio Cirillo, Elisabeth Czihak, Helmut Drucker / Kabelmann, Christian Ecker, Georg Frauenschuh, Heribert Friedl, Stephan Genser, Gunda Gruber, Elisabeth Grübl, Katharina Gruzei, Julia Gutweniger, Lena Rosa Händle, Michael Heindl, Moni K. Huber, Karen Irmer, Violeta Ivanova, Marion Kalter, Eginhartz Kanter, Ulrike Königshofer, Miye Lee, Dominik Louda, Olena Newkryta, Elena Peytchinska, Konrad Rainer, Simona Reisch, Oktavia Schreiner, Johannes Steidl, Rudolf Strobl, Sylvia Winkler
Curator: Beatrix Zobl
Photos © Andrew Phelps
In Never Happy enough, Jari Genser reflects on loneliness in the creative process. By interweaving romanticized depictions of the outside world, the artist deals with the themes of seeing and being seen as well as the feeling of being trapped in pictorial worlds. In order to illustrate the complex mechanisms of interaction between the inside and the outside, Genser created a space within a space - the in-situ installation Noasis.
The accessible column with mirrored windows seems to offer refuge from social interactions. But there is a trap lurking behind the shielding facade: the mirrored glass has an integrated spy function that subjects the people inside to voyeuristic gazes. At a time when social media and other digital platforms enable omnipresent surveillance, Genser raises the question of the accessibility of true relaxation.
Text: Esther Mlenek
Photos © Jari Genser
In his works, Jari Genser reflects on what he perceives on a daily basis. Repetition as a diary-like reference and stylistic device characterises his picture-in-picture works. He is inspired by literature, his travels or current events in the media. Guided by the artist's attentive gaze, the viewer opens up interior and exterior spaces to be explored.
Photos © Jari Genser
Wonderland – this is the title of Jari Genser's Gallery Statement at Galerie 422, inviting visitors to submerge themselves in his picture-in-picture worlds and experience his installation as an immersive experience. In a conversation with Marlene Poeckh (Galerie 422), Jari Genser reveals more about the project, his picture-in-picture idea and the significance of houseplants in his works.
Photos © Jari Genser
Galerie Leuenroth,
Frankfurt am Main (DE)
Group exhibition
with Anya Triestram
and Janosch Dannemann
27.1. – 11.3.2023
Home is the place you come from, the house you grew up in, the room you live in right now, the space you work in, the place you return to or remember most fondly ...?
This exhibition shows works by Janosch Dannemann [Leipzig] and Jari Genser [Vienna], two young positions, together with new works by Anya Triestram [Leipzig/Vienna]. They are different perspectives on and into spaces, views from the outside in or from the inside out, and they show what can be grasped from one point to another. There are rooms and tents, curtains and windows, objects and all kinds of furniture. Rarely do people enter the scenery. A few dogs are here and there. Moods can be read and whether it is raining or the sun is shining can be guessed. Sometimes you even see the same view in different weathers. It is real, fantasized and collaged stages and rooms, it is one's own studio or a foreign one, it is the apartment, it is details or larger cutouts on orders in corners, which one can enter and look at. No matter what assumptions are made about these places - for the duration of this exhibition, the paintings are at home in the Leuenroth Gallery.
Text and idea: Anya Triestram (translated)
Photos © Galerie Leuenroth
The Annual Exhibition Exhibition Was fehlt [What is missing] takes the curatorial concept as distributed to the invited artist members and transforms this into a question about voids—whether political, social, spatial or in the imagination. If we examine the artistic contributions to the exhibition, we find means of dealing with abandoned buildings and things, with memories, longing and other unexpected life plans, as well as with topics of mutual support, environmental awareness and the endurance of indeterminacy. Since many of the suggestions do not fit into an either-or, Was fehlt becomes less an answer to the initial question than a stimulus to further thinking.
Artists at Salzburger Kunstverein: Michael Dietrich, Bartosz Dolhun, David Eisl, Gabriele Fulterer & Christine Scherrer, Jari Genser, Gruppe 19, Isabella Heigl, Daniel Hüttler, Violeta Ivanova, Eginhartz Kanter, Christel Kiesel, Margareta Klose, Catherine Ludwig, Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer, Isabell Rauchenbichler, Sophie Stadler, Borjana Ventzislavova, Georg Zenz.
Artists at Museumspavillon: Rosa Andraschek, Stella Bach, Katharina Gruzei, Bernhard Hetzenauer, Felix Pöchhacker, Elisabeth Schmirl, Luz Olivares Capelle, Nadine Weixler
In public space: Motahar Amiri
Curated by Maximilian Lehner in conversation with Kirila Cvetkovska und Tia Čiček.
Photos © Andrew Phelps
Confort Mental,
Paris (FR)
Group exhibition
with Alja Piry,
Georg Pinteritsch,
Samira Saidi
and Peter Schreiner
22. – 26.10.2022
(Opening 21.10.2022)
The exhibition project Through The Spectacle brings together five artistic positions that could not be more different. What unites them is that their creators met as "Artists in Residence" in 2021 at the Cite international des Arts Paris. The decision to show the works created on site in a group pushes the artists’ positions, which are located between painting, experimental text work, photography and new media, into a close relationship, which - despite their common genesis - they do not actually have. And yet, connections inevitably arise. While Jari Genser’s paintings deals with his living and work space in Paris, Samira Saidi makes historical works of art the starting point for her exploration and reinterpretation of Afro-European pioneer women of the 18th and 19th centuries. In her video work, Alja Piry places the colloquial term „Unkraut“ (weed) in a specific literary context, and Georg Pinteritsch brings abstract bodies and objects into a strange relationship of tension with their distorted surroundings. As his images refer to alchemical representations suggesting a hidden order of things, Peter Schreiner makes use of the rules of a well-known game of skill to create a random portrait of the city of Paris.
Photos © Peter Schreiner
One work - one viewer.
ONExONE is a room installation that may only be entered individually. It is made for one work and for one person.
It is a confrontation at eye level. A situation in which nothing is predetermined. Exchange or demarcation, dialogue or ignoring each other, intimate or impersonal: you do not decide alone.
When you look into a depth, the depth also looks into you.
Photos © Jari Genser
"Transparency" - a promise with which politics and business like to advertise, but which is rarely kept. In times of treacherous chat protocols, the term takes on a new dimension. Some works in the exhibition deal with the "independence" of the media, others with appearance and reality. How much of a life of their own do processes have? How does our perception change when familiar objects suddenly appear to us in a different light?
In a curatorial experimental arrangement, works by different generations of artists will enter into dialogue and established mechanisms of the art market will be questioned. Authors and details are deliberately faded out in the presentation and thus all participants are placed on the same level. Does this free the focus on the work? Is the focus finally on the essential? OPAK is thus a low-threshold experimental arrangement that perhaps opens up the art market to those who feel deterred by the prevailing elitist information policy.
Photos © Jari Genser
Group show with works by Abiona Esther Ojo, Egor Urakov, Federico Vecchi, Haruko Maeda, Jari Genser, Lena Kuzmich, Linda Berger, Paul Robas, and Petra Schnakenberg.
The group exhibition Heady Days is the result of the cooperation between the association Les Nouveaux Riches for contemporary art and culture and the gallery Elektrohalle Rhomberg. Through nine multifaceted artistic positions, it invites visitors to leave behind and go beyond the boundaries and limitations of their respective realities and perceptions thereof. Some of the works shown have been created specifically for the exhibition, while others were chosen from the artists’ existing oeuvre. Owing to the diversity of artistic approaches, the exhibition comprises a great variety of media ranging from painting, sculpture, multimedia installations to miniature models and mosaics.
Text: Elektrohalle Rhomberg, 2021.
Photos © Andrew Phelps
Galerie Rudolf Leeb,
Salzburg (AT)
Group exhibition with
Magdalena Kreinecker
and Hessam Samavatian
30.1. – 3.4.2020
(Opening 29.1.2020)
The exhibition Raumblenden deals with the dispositif of space and its constitution. What possibilities are there for representing spaces and how do artistic procedures simultaneously intervene in the concealment or blinding of spaces or allow certain lines of sight and not others? [...]
Like photography, painting also determines the ways in which spaces are viewed. Although painting once served as a direct means of depicting nature or the surrounding space, photography has been introduced here for 180 years as an intermediate stage that establishes visual contact with spatial structures and replaces real vision with a medial one. Painting is thus no longer considered the primary means of expression of art, but has to face other media in order to allow new ways of looking at reality. On the other hand, this reflexive attitude leads to spaces being nested as modules and robbed of the free view. Layers and superimpositions or apertures interlock and reference a virtual world that attempts to penetrate from a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional dimension.
Text: Walter Seidl, curator of the exhibition (translated)
Photos © Anna Sophia Rußmann & Jari Genser
In the series Good Titles for Artworks, Jari Genser reflects on the problem of giving titles to completed artistic works. Already on the level of typeface, Genser's slogan-like painted questions and statements begin to unfold an irritating effect. In terms of content, the text images scattered in the room and hanging on the wall pose questions about our (un)fulfilled ideas of freedom.
The contact with propositions, advice and imperatives moves now and then proverbially comfortably between black and white in life phases and democratic decision-making situations. Sayings and slogans thereby bypass discursive practice and, through their opinionated command structure, distance themselves from the desirable ideal state of communicative reason. All kinds of philosophical slogans, e.g. "tit for tat", "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", replace through their superficiality the give and take of reasons in the convoluted structures of elaborate negotiation processes; simple messages are supposed to shine above the thicket of the forest of opinions.
Not to trust this black and white thinking recommends Jari Genser's curvaceously drawn and intertwined text images. The paths of reading and understanding move on manifold routes through his painted proverbial dictionary, the flow of reading sometimes seems to jam and cascade into the deep structure of the sentences, sloping cliffs and embankments unsettle puffed-up opinions. The graphically executed text confronts the viewer first and suddenly on a sensual level, opening up a brief temporal interlude a scant moment before legibility and therein a space for the aesthetic treatment of the sentences painted on by Genser.
Text: Nikolaus Kohlberger (translated)
Photo © Jari Genser
Participating Artists: Alexandra Baumgartner, Angelika Wienerroither, Anja Ronacher, Christiane Peschek, Csaba Fürjesi, Elisabeth Schmirl, Erich Gruber, Florian Nährer, Georg Frauenschuh, Jari Genser, Johanna Binder, Johannes Steidl, Jonas Geise, Lavinia Lanner, Margareta Klose, Martina Mühlfellner, Stefan Heizinger, Stefan Kreiger, Tina Hainschwang, Ulrich Nausner and Zoe Vitzthum
Elektrohalle Rhomberg invited Séamus Kealy to curate an exhibition and select a group of artists to present their work.The only criterion: every artist should have a relationship to Salzburg.
The result is an exhibition of over twenty artists from different media with the title “Fortress of Salt”. The theme of the exhibition itself is the imaginative translation of the city of “Salzburg” into the english language. Rather, the concept of a fortress made of salt is illustrated, which itself leads to several associations. One tries to address issues such as the fragility of civilization in general (both historical and contemporary), the passage of time, the impact of the crisis on larger structures, the dissolution of ideas, even philosophy, and also in response to political pressure (be it political or not) from the outside. In fact, however, it also represents the dissolution of something robust that appears susceptible to the effects of external forces.
Using this metaphor, Séamus Kealy has selected over twenty artists, each of whom react freely and individually to this topic through their work. The gallery is divided into several sections, each of which provides its own frame and at the same time increases / opens up from the whole.
Text: Elektrohalle Rhomberg, 2020.
Photos © Andrew Phelps
Works of the candidates: Sarah Bildstein, Jari Genser, Lena Göbel (prize winner), Julia Gutweniger, Matthias Lautner, Drago Persic, Georg Pinteritsch, Gregor Pirker, Florian Schmidt, Martin Steininger.
The prize, named after the famous Salzburg painter Anton Faistauer (1887 - 1930), has been awarded by the province of Salzburg for over 45 years. It is awarded alternately with other awards in the field of fine arts every three years and is endowed with € 7,000.
The call for entries for this is made throughout Austria for artists under the age of 40. The age limit is justified so that young positions can always be presented in the exhibition and new talents can be discovered.
The jury consists of: Doris Theres Hofer, prize winner 2017, Dr. Gerda Ridler, art historian, director of the OÖ Landesmuseum until 2017, and Mag. Günther Oberhollenzer, curator Landesgalerie Niederösterreich, Kunstmeile Krems.
In a 1st session on June 3, the jurors selected from the 80 submissions (which consisted of catalogs, photographs and texts) the 10 contenders for the exhibition in the Landesgalerie im Traklhaus.
In another session, which will take place directly in the exhibition, in front of the originals, jury will choose from these painters the prize winner.
Photos © Rudolf Strobl
Kunstraum SUPER,
Wien (AT)
Group exhibition
with Simon Goritschnig
and Anna Schmoll
28.11. – 4.12.2020
In the middle of the 19th century, the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel crossed different pea varieties and thus showed how genetic traits are inherited. Simon Goritschnig and Jari Genser did not so much want to test Mendel's rules for their correctness as to make them tangible for themselves and others. Their experiment, which moves between art and science, explores the question of whether artists are also suitable as botanists.
Photos © Simon Goritschnig
Periscope,
Salzburg (AT)
Group exhibition
with Marion Reisinger
12.4. – 4.5.2019
A subjective history inscribes itself as a moment of memory in all of the works presented, and all of them are concerned in different ways with preserving it. What they have in common is that the materiality of memory takes on a central role, on the one hand as the works' passage into the living space, but on the other hand also material as changeable, enduring, or as the embodiment of transience.
Subjective memory spaces emerge masked in reference structures of different temporal levels or materialities. The memories inscribed in the works are united by the notion that they seem to be stored for a special moment that one does not yet know about, an open future in the ideal sense. Possibly, however, one knows just as little where the memory has its origin or whether it is a memory at all that we perceive. Perhaps this will become clear on a rainy day.
Text: Maximilian Lehner (translated)
Photo © Jari Genser
Junges Wort, junge Kunst, junge Szene, Junge Junge. Der Jugendstil feiert seinen hundertsten Geburtstag, die jungen Wilden haben weder Jugend noch Stil. Alt sind sie geworden. Aber so wird es uns allen ergehen. Wenn wir Glück haben.
Text published in: Anita Thanhofer (Ed.) (2019), Junges Wort. Broschüre zur Ausstellung.
People Want / We All Need was a site-specific installation that was conceptualized for the exhibition Junges Wort (Young Word) in 2019. The main topic was art as a possibility for resistence against the instrumentalization by economical interests. Formally the installation consisted of a series of text works that constrained themselves to the colours black and white (or light and shadow).
The installation consisted of the hanging sculpture People Want Positive Messages But Art Is Not Adver- tising (2017) and several wall paintings in combination with found objects. These works could be found in several rooms of an (abandoned) former brewery building. They could be seen from different angles and under different lighting conditions, thus integrating the space into the work.
People Want Positive Messages But Art Is Not Advertising addresses an issue that is relevant when exhibit- ing art, especially in the public domain: Art should transmit positive, life-affirming messages. By hanging the installation in front of a hole in the wall, the black letters almost disappear, leaving only People Want Art Not Advertising.
Art is a sphere of life where negative thoughts and feelings can be expressed. Art does not have to please anyone. That does not mean that it can or should not transmit positive messages, but art must not serve the interests of an industry that systematically tries to influence people. In the early 20th century that has been called propaganda, nowadays it is called advertising. I do not want to have to do anything with that.
The second part of the installation is called We all need and adresses the capacity of art to break up rigid systems: We all need a little more chaos. This is a reference to the chaos in which I found the pieces of styrofoam that I used to carve the letters. In a time where algorithms are used to transform our consum- ing habits into money the refusal to be categorized is an act of rebellion.
As an artist you are often told that it is necessary to advertise one’s work. But if all I do is only advertising for myself that makes me less that I am. And I make art precisely to express what I cannot be - to be more than I am.
Photo © Jari Genser
Sewon Art Space,
Yogyakarta (ID)
Solo exhibition
Opening 12.9.2018
Cats for Gustav
Magic for Albrecht
Umbul-Umbul for me
CM&U2 is a multimedial installation that consists of works I created during an Artist Residency in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. It includes my version of Gustav Klimt’s photo with his cat, a variety of works from the series Melencolia I.o (a wooden cube, prints, paintings and photos) and of course the world-famous Umbul-Umbul that adorn Indonesia’s streets each August 17th (installed on bamboo branches from the backyard).
Sometimes it’s hard to separate life and work, life and art, life and... anything.
Photo © Jari Genser
SaRanG Art Space,
Yogyakarta (ID)
Solo exhibition
20.8. – 10.9.2018
Dear friends,
I cannot bear it any longer. Not because of my insomnia or my chronic anxiety. It is because of art.
Because of what they call art. Two weeks ago I have been to Paris and visited the Fondation Louis Vuitton. They let me in for free. That was nice. But the exhibition. An Art-Disneyland. Works by the most renowned artists of our time. Art reduced to design. Luxury handbags, Luxury art. Exchangeable. Soulless.
The starting point for my art is sometimes love, more often despair. I cannot promise what I do is good. I cannot even promise it is authentic. But I can, in all humility, say that my work is meaningful to me. That I have spent my time, my thoughts and my feelings on it. My life. So yes, it is kind of a sentimental journey.
A journey that I hope will lead towards a new sensibility. They say anything can be art, but in the end art is always just what they approve. It has never been about what is art and what is not. It is about the feeling. The teddy bear that has been loved to rags by its owner is more valuable than those shiny objects that repulse any feelings.
Let’s start again. Once more with feeling. Do not try to protect yourself, make yourself vulnerable. The times where anything can be art are over.
I want real feelings. I want real art.
(Text inspired by Araki Nobuyoshi, A Sentimental Journey)
Photo © Jari Genser
This year’s annual member’s exhibition opens just ahead of Mary‘s conception on the Catholic calendar. The exhibition theme “Purity in Imperfection” playfully refers to this day and its associations, and invites artists to consider notions of purity, impurity, perfection and
imperfection as these topics might arise in their work.
Almost all genres of art will be shown, from painting, drawing, photography, installation and video. Seventeen artists invite you to discover and even acquire their artwork.
Artists: Alexandra Baumgartner, Christian Ecker, Gertrud Fischbacher, Jari Genser, Renate Hausenblas, Stefan
Heizinger, Eginhartz Kanter, Isabella Kohlhuber, Reinhart Mlineritsch, David Muth, Lilo Nein, Olena Newkryta, Simona Obholzer, Christiane Peschek, Felix Pöchhacker, Psyschwestern, Ingrid Schreyer
Curatorial Jury: Karolina Radenković (Leitung 5020), Tina Teufel (Kuratorin MdMS), Gerold Tusch (Künstler, Vorstandsmitglied Salzburger Kunstverein)
Photos © Andrew Phelps
For the resistance of art not to disappear into its opposite, the unsolved tension between the two resistances cannot but remain. Jacques Rancière
Art is the cream in our coffee and the spanner in the works of our society. Salzburg’s history and its wealth demonstrate that economy and art cannot exist without each other. And yet―or exactly for this reason―there is always tension between art and society. 33 contemporary artists react to the ambivalences of our society and the resistance offered by materials, while also providing a place for an exchange of opinions. In their works, they experiment and research, they analyse, dismantle, reflect, mount and recombine, intensify and create new images.
The Salzburger Kunstverein’s annual exhibition is a tradition that emerged from the original founding principles of this organisation in 1844, like that of other Kunstvereins. They emerged parallel to the development of the modern male “exhibition artist” (at this time, women were not permitted in the academies and salons). Kunstvereins, seen in this context, represented artists, as they themselves were often groups of artists as well as funders. In this case, the Salzburger Kunstverein had an original mission to facilitate “the mediation and sale of contemporary art from the countries of the monarchy and the neighboring foreign countries.”
Artists: Julia Amelie, Maurizio Cirillo, Elisabeth Czihak, Helmut Drucker / Kabelmann, Christian Ecker, Georg Frauenschuh, Heribert Friedl, Stephan Genser, Gunda Gruber, Elisabeth Grübl, Katharina Gruzei, Julia Gutweniger, Lena Rosa Händle, Michael Heindl, Moni K. Huber, Karen Irmer, Violeta Ivanova, Marion Kalter, Eginhartz Kanter, Ulrike Königshofer, Miye Lee, Dominik Louda, Olena Newkryta, Elena Peytchinska, Konrad Rainer, Simona Reisch, Oktavia Schreiner, Johannes Steidl, Rudolf Strobl, Sylvia Winkler
Curator: Beatrix Zobl
Photos © Andrew Phelps