The film “On a Semiology of the Senses” and early conceptual works like the “Lard Drawings” mark the beginning of Rudolf Polanszky’s career as a visual artist in 1976. Through the observation of various artistic methods, in this first group of conceptual works the artist developed strategies for circumventing “externally determined”, unconscious controls of behaviour.

The ostensible freedom of choice seemed questionable and depended on determined schemes. The structure from "process depending" results should get analyzed and couched trough the restriction on methods. The concepts of "Koma", “Coil Spring Drawings" and “Sitting Pictures" (1983-1985) belong to this field of activity.

 

Simultaneously Polanszky created works on S-8 film, video and multimedia collages, such as the already mentioned „On a Semiology of the Senses“ 1976, „The Musical Ape“ 1979, „Coil Spring -Demo“ 1983, „Koma“ 1983, „Memory and Music/ The Musical Ape II“ 1999, “Piece for Animals / Brain Mythology / The Musical Ape III“, and later programmatic videos on projects like „Models for Transaggregate Structures“ 2007, or „Hyperbolic Spaces“ 2010.

 

To describe the science-alike relation of his theoretical work, the artist introduced words as "transformation", “non-linearity" and "symmetries" to the artistic world. Ideas like "ad hoc syntheses" and art as a part of the evolution illuminate Polanszky's way of working and thinking. The consistent evolutionary progress of his artworks, from his earliest “Lard Drawings", via "Tierstempelbilder" (structures made from animal tracks) and “Nylon Convolution" through to "Reconstructions" (1990s), peaks in the development of the object-like, three-dimensional pictorial works towards the objects, sculptures and installations such as “Hypertransformation Sculptures" or the “Hyperbolic Spaces".

 

In the 1990s, the methodological approaches evolved into work on transformative, structural aspects of topologies, which led to the development of “Translinear Reconstructions". The two-dimensional concept of "surfaces" was already undermined in the "Reconstructions", from 1995 onwards, by non-linear procedures such as layering and deep-structure transformations and led via the three-dimensional "Foldings" etc. to the concepts of “Hyperbolic Spaces" and “Hypertransformation Sculptures".

 

Polanszky's current emphasis lays on evolving the idea of translinear prcesses as well as additional occupation with “Prim Spaces" on the basis of multidimensional transformations and symmetrical structures and thereto their alter-ego the “Negative Spaces".