The work of Heimo Zobernig (Austrian, born 1958) uses a wide range of media including painting, sculpture and video. For more than thirty years the artist has been creating work whose formal reduction conveys an impression of succinctness, if not randomness, often underlined by the use of “poor” everyday materials. These objects frequently imply or suggest some kind of functionality that assigns them to the realms of presentation, exhibiting or domestic living.

In his exhibition at Mudam, Zobernig uses the idiosyncrasies of the building’s architecture, more specifically the mirroring effect induced by the two identical yet inverted exhibition spaces on the first floor. Taking his cue from their stage-like character, he decided to exhibit his paintings and sculptures separately so as to highlight their intrinsic qualities and differ-ences, whereby sculpture is an object that can be observed from all sides, while painting, even when understood as an object, remains a space of illusion or projection.

The East gallery presents a series of 15 monochrome paintings made between 1986 and 2013, which can be seen as genre variations referring to the adventure of modernist abstrac-tion (such as Kazimir Malevich’s White on White from 1918 or Barnett Newman’s paintings), while the western gallery accommodates a series of 21 sculptures from 1983 to 2014 echoing Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades and 1960s American Minimal and Conceptual Art, among others. Freed from painting, sculpture is here no longer ‘something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting’, as the American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt put it.

Zobernig’s exhibition unfolds in two chapters. After Luxembourg, it will be continued at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover in November, where it will also occupy two distinct spaces. The first gallery will host the same group of sculptures, while the second will present a dif-ferent series of paintings based on the most recent work shown in the exhibition at Mudam, Untitled (2013).

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