Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz Hosts Johanna and Helmut Kandl

Sunday, 01 October 2006 14:50

LINZ, AUSTRIA - With a selection of approximately 60 works comprising paintings, installations and video art Johanna and Helmut Kandl present the first extensive exhibition of their work to be staged in a museum in the Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz.  The exhibition runs from 29 Sept 2006 – 14 January 2007.

With this exhibition the Linz museum provides the first ever chance to discover the couple’s versatility and the broad yet precisely defined range of themes that they present in a variety of different media and actionist formats, and to see their works gathered together in one place.  At this particular time an exhibition of this kind is extremely timely, if not overdue, since Johanna and Helmut Kandl have long been known as prolific artists, producing an almost constant stream of exhibitions and projects that have been shown at so many different locations that even aficionados and others interested in their work have had difficulty grasping its true extent and complexity.

Johanna Kandl was born in 1954 and studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art from 1972 to 1980.  Since the end of the 1980s she has been involved in interventions and cooperative projects.  Since 1997 she has been working with her husband Helmut on art projects based on ideas garnered during trips to the former Eastern bloc and the examination of the economic structures prevalent in those countries.  This explains the way the pair of Austrian artists perceive art, namely as a means of shedding light on the world, on countries and regions with a focus on history, politics and the economy.  The Kandls’ work deals chiefly with political and social changes of the present time and the behavior of individuals living in these systems.  However, they never turn the spotlight on the global players, but concentrate more on the micro-economy and private lives.

Extensive travels in Eastern Europe

It is not only as a painter, her true vocation, that Johanna Kandl is regarded as a bordercrosser who has, for more than 20 years, held painting to be a form of social criticism.  A scholarship in Belgrade at the beginning of the 1980s sparked her interest in the (now former) socialist countries in southern and eastern Europe, which she has maintained until the present day and now shares with Helmut Kandl.  The couple regularly travel extensively in eastern Europe, visiting countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Russia and the Ukraine as well as Austria’s immediate neighbors in search of new sources for their work.  The artist uses the photographs taken during these trips as the template for her own pictures, which are primarily paintings done in tempera with egg on wood.

What is striking about her pictures is the wealth of detail: the details, subtly painted genre scenes, resemble snapshots that are altered by the addition of written slogans.  It is these “notes in the margin” that, for Kandl, contain the politically relevant statement.  The quotes used are taken either from the business pages of daily newspapers or are reminiscent of phrases from the realms of marketing and motivational training.  In this way their contrast with the everyday scenes depicted is underscored.  Kandl uses this technique to highlight social and economic problems in the former Eastern bloc with its own new economic laws and conveys her own personal perspective through her painting. 

Videos and projects in public spaces

In their videos Johanna and Helmut Kandl tell (im)probable stories from Central Europe and its borders that subtly blend fact and fiction.  A new video installation will be presented as part of the exhibition in the Lentos that refers specifically to the Lentos as a location and to the museum’s collection.  For some time now the two artists have seen their task, also in the field of art, as a job entrusted to them by business and the public sector.  Their projects promote the linking of various aspects of daily life and the working world and serve Johanna and Helmut Kandl as an empirical component of their social analysis.

Visit the Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz at : www.lentos.at