‘With art I would like to raise questions and as a result produce things that put themselves in question.’
-- Heimo Zobernig
Heimo Zobernig (born 1958, Austria) is one of the most significant artists working in Europe today. Since the 1980s he has exhibited extensively all over the world creating a considerable body of work that includes sculpture, video, painting, installation, architectural intervention and performance.
This exhibition at Tate St Ives will be the first time his work has been shown in the UK.
Much of Zobernig’s work critically engages with various modern art movements, including abstraction, constructivism, minimalism and conceptual art, as well as with architecture, design and theatre. Drawing on various art histories he questions the principles and conditions which underpin them; challenging and reinterpreting them with a lightness of touch and an economy of material that is at times playful, dry, witty, unsettling and disarming.
This exhibition comprises important works made by Zobernig over the last twenty-five years, as well as a number of new interventions into both the architecture of the galleries at Tate St Ives and the collection displays within; drawn from the last 300 years, the artist has specially selected a range of significant paintings and sculptures from the Tate Collection.
They include works by Pablo Picasso, Carl Andre, Henry Moore, Ad Reinhardt, Oskar Kokoschka, James Webb, Henry Wallis, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters. Further works by the St Ives ‘moderns’ are also included, from Patrick Heron, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo to Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and Karl Weschke.
Through Zobernig’s idiosyncratic choice and presentation of the Tate Collection and through the dynamic juxtaposition with his own works, the artist radically challenges the gallery context to produce an exhilarating and unorthodox display.