ASSEYE

Bernhard Frue, Hamburg
16.06.2006 - 28.07.2006

The work of Viennese artist Bernhard Fruehwirth (*1968) was already on show in Hamburg in March 2004. In the exhibition "Self-Portrait/Identity" at the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, he showed set pieces from his former studio, which - together with drawings and photographs - were staged as an archive of work and memories. Previously, individual components of the installation had not been destroyed by a controlled fire, but had been damaged or altered in their appearance and function. Bernhard Fruehwirth seems to repeatedly seek out the shifts in context, the reshuffling of function and meaning. In his current artfinder exhibition "Asseye", the title itself is an expression of an associative language game in the phonetic-semantic sense, which offers different word contents and interpretations, but cannot be translated as a fixed term. The play with interwoven levels of meaning and interpretations is already visible at the entrance to the gallery: the door is covered with inlaid works on which different, sometimes contradictory symbols and messages are inscribed inside and out. The skull with a swastika and a pistol pointed at it - a motif from the counter-movement of the Bush election campaign - finds its place there, as does a cleaning figure wiping dirt from a tiled floor. One sentence immediately catches the eye, evoking the horror par excellence from Stanley Kubrick's film "The Shining": "Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today". A Spanish proverb with similar words but a completely opposite meaning can be found on the back of the inlaid door: "What you can do tomorrow, you don't have to do today". The artist does not resolve the contradiction that lies as an unbridgeable abyss between these two formulations, but instead entices the viewer to follow both "settings" in parallel, as it were, and to allow the synchronicity of the (opposing) information. A strategy that - measured against the current sensory overload - could guarantee the survival of the individual. Fruehwirth's drawings, some of which are large-format, are two superimposed drawings from different contexts, such as Jean Dubuffet's tree sculpture on the forecourt of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and a detail of a burnt apartment. This double drawing evokes the image of an iris rotating around itself, which appears in 2 drawings as a positive ("Eye") and negative form ("Second Eye"). Bernhard Fruehwirth (*1968) lives and works in Vienna.