Hans Weigand: „Dark Surfing with Sigmund“ & More

27 January 2012 – 3 March 2012
Opening: Thu, 26 January 2012, 19h

“As a border figure between the visual and applied arts, Hans Weigand reacts to social phenomena in scenarios and performances suggestive of utopias. His experimental treatment of modern myths is penetrating with its extraordinary motifs and the depictions of a culturally networked world image. A special quality of his works lies in the innovative implementation of specific materials, whereby the artist, in test procedures as it were, reacts immediately to technological developments and thus formulates momentary recordings of time.

His “taste for pop” shows itself as a preference for all that is popular, that can be communicated through media, and that displays a mass-effect; he thus looks back at strategies from the collage of popular cultural subjects, musical subculture, and art history, that have delivered important impulses for the development of new images. To this can be added media production and the combining of digital-photo montage with the means of painting. (Excerpts from the MAK press release, 2010)

The monumental panorama installations have been paradigmatic in recent years. The panorama Dark Surfing with Sigmund, was created in 2010 and presented the same year at Art Center Los Angeles; it can be seen in Europe for the first time. With this, Weigand’s image world can be experienced in a new way; an image of today’s society, in which the lightness of Californian popular culture blends with dark and abysmal appearances.

In the photo series Disco Boys (1977), titled after a Frank Zappa song, one’s own, youth-culturally placed self becomes the material to work with: the body becomes the projection surface that is superimposed with different styles of the time. Cotton 2010 mirrors a genealogical interest, typically for Weigand’s undertakings, namely for how an American-influenced piece of pop trivia has flowed into everyday culture of middle Europe. (Cf. Christian Höller, 2005). Weigand films a penny opera, makes a B movie into a photo novel, and uses a classical psychedelic element as spatial architecture.

& More: Installation-intervention by Hans Weigand with works of artist friends such as Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Michel Würthle, Martin Kippenberger, Franz West, and Heimo Zobernig.

Curator: Stefan Bidner