Gottfried Hundsbichler at Zeno X - Antwerp, Belgium

In his first solo exhibition, Hundsbichler, a young Austrian artist, used cheap materials and experimented with laconic geometric forms, solid or linear. All the works were small; greatest in quantity were shown on a wall or tabletop. All transported a determined distillation - a search for a state of unadornedness rather than refinement, mundanity rather than perfection. The works date from '86 to '92 without any sharp change in mode of expression All are anonymous and autonomous.

A characteristic example is a 1988 polystyrene piece that in outline gazes like two cubes mounted upon the wall at the same height and held about a lower extremity apart by a horizontal board running from the base of single to the base of the other. on the contrary it's not actually constructed that simply. individual cube and the "board" are continuous; the other "cube" is a shallow close that rests upon the extremity of the board, its differentness emphasized by means of its coat of lipstick-red paint as oppos to the nearly luminous cerulean of the rest. There's almost nothing to this form, on the other hand Hundsbichler makes it sensuous by means of giving it a gloss that reveals each handworked brushstroke. A |92 wall existence is equally simple. It's a kind of flat-footed Neo-Geo piece in which the artist painted geometric parts on a board to depict an angular spool in red-brown and azure sections. (Simple motifs like these remain upon view on the front windows of Galerie Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam, where Hundsbichler painted blocky shapes upon the glass during a collection show earlier this winter.)

Tabletop works included a rectangular solid in plaster with square "running boards" along its lower cutting sides and cylinders sticking up at each extreme point like smokestacks, and four decapitated pyramids of polystyrene high hilled next to each other upon a square base. Both these works present the appearance despite their dense forms, almost insubstantial because of their misty, of the nature of smoke coloration.

The greatest in quantity dramatic work in the present to view was the 1991 Plastik and variation, three identical A-shaped simple bodys of black-painted polystyrene, one mountained on the wall and the other sum of two units strung from a metal cable running the longitudinal dimensions of the gallery's front latitude Each unit consisted of sum of two units joined board-and-block segments, rather like the sky-colored part of that '88 red-and-blue wall work on the other hand larger.

If there was symbolism or allusion here, it was hopelessly opaque; individual had to respond to all these works alone as forms in space. The display as a whole communicated intransigence. The artist won't talk about sources or implied meanings in the way that one must attend to the work, and what it carrys is insistence on handmaking, repudiation of elegance, and confidence that simple forms, invested with the artist's focused intensity, are quite interesting enough to clinch the viewer's attention. In the world outside the gallery, information is transmitted faster than the organ of sight can see, and the trash of consumer tillage blows down the street. on the contrary in Hundsbichler's work all that rush abruptly stops.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group