Gerwald Rockenschaub: bass+ (re)modification

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present bass+ (re)modification, the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition by the Berlin-based Austrian artist Gerwald Rockenschaub.

Rockenschaub has been transforming spaces with minimalist multimedia installations for around forty years. With constantly changing shapes, colours, sizes, materials and technologies – sometimes abstract, sometimes simplified figurative, but always with radical reduction and laconic smoothness – his installations create visual sounds and rhythms that relate to the architecture in question, setting it in tension and vibration like a musical composition. Rockenschaub, who has also worked as a techno DJ, composes his art like musical tracks: empty spaces correspond to pauses, settings create sounds and beats.

For this new exhibition, the artist has produced rectangular, monochrome lacquered MDF panels of varying colour and size, which he positions above and below a continuous horizontal line on the walls of the exhibition space. In this way he organizes the space and creates a pulsating atmosphere that feels like a soundscape – stimulating visually, physically and emotionally. The idea of painting evoked by the coloured MDF panels is completely removed: In their pointed interplay, the objects experience an enormous expansion and completely transform their surroundings. Instead of looking at pictures, we experience the whole space as a picture.

Rockenschaub never thinks in terms of individual works. Each object has a specific function within the overall context of an exhibition. The precise placement of the elements in dialogue with the architecture is crucial to creating dynamism. Although the artist designs his installations precisely on the computer in advance, the final steps are ultimately spontaneous and playful. Despite their edgy coolness, playfulness and subtle humour are the parameters within which Rockenschaub’s works unfold their energy. This is precisely what his work, which emerged in the 1980s in the context of the Neo Geo movement, is all about: using radically reduced means to achieve powerful atmospheric effects that appeal to all the senses. In contrast to classical minimal or conceptual art, he creates a mixture of pop and primary structures that recall traditional genres of art history as well as our thoroughly designed everyday life. Rockenschaub nonchalantly disrupts both – and ends up somewhere between fun, funky and frivolous: with an art that defies any art historical categorization.

Gesine Borcherdt