Rudolf Polanszky | Project
Denis Gardarin Gallery is pleased to announce that it will participate in this year’s VOLTA NY with the first focused presentation of Viennese artist Rudolf Polanszky’s Reconstructions Paintings in New York City. Spanning two decades from 1990 until 2010, Polanszky’s Reconstructions Paintings explore the three-dimensional topology of canvases created by the confrontation between various materials such as paint, textiles, wood, plastics, asphalt, and foil. Polanszky’s works will be featured in Denis Gardarin Gallery’s Booth B6 at VOLTA NY from Thursday, March 5th to Sunday, March 8th at Pier 90, located at West 50th Street and 12th Avenue.
A key figure in the Viennese Actionism movement of the 1960s and 70s, Polanszky has worked with and influenced artists such as Franz West and Dieter Roth. He is known for his process-dependent multimedia works that explore questions of free will versus predetermined outcomes in art and human behavior more generally. In his Reconstructions series, Polanszky investigates these themes through the interactions between various materials on his canvases. The artist himself describes the concept: “Mostly, “linear” means one after the other, “Reconstructions” in my work always means a “non-linear” transcription and free order of structures or fragments … to find a new subjective quality of transformation of meaning and its interpretation …” Denis Gardarin Gallery’s focused presentation explores how the Reconstructions series was influenced by the philosophies the artist developed over the course of his career, from his early Actionist films to later process-dependent two-dimensional works.
Polanszky has been widely exhibited in Europe, and has two solo exhibitions opening later this year: a retrospective at the Dominikanerkirche in Krems, Austria from May to October 2015, and an exhibition of new work opening at the Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples, Italy in June 2015. Born in 1951 in Vienna, Polanszky’s earlier series, such as his Lard Drawings, Animal Print Pictures, and Spring Paintings, dealt explicitly with the tensions between planning and randomness in the artistic process. For example, to create his Spring Paintings, Polanszky jumped on a coil spring while holding a paintbrush and periodically touching paper with it, thus presenting a confrontation between the dynamic of the spring and the artist’s own skill. Polanszky’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others.
