With Gerwald Rockenschaub (born in 1952 in Vienna), Kunsthalle Bern is putting into the spotlight a pioneer of the crossover of pop, design and club culture who has revolutionised traditional concepts of art. Rockenschaub’s works moved away from the early oil paintings from the beginning of the eighties, which, with their emblematic aesthetic language and their clear colorfulness, were a stark contrast to the expressive paintings of the Neue Wildeat the time, and progressed towards spatial installations and paintings that make use of adhesive foil. Surveying Gerwald Rockenschaub’s artistic career from its beginnings until today, one can clearly discern an emerging tendency, stemming from painting, to refer to images and spaces. The connections between the artefact and its surroundings become ever more important and evolve into a complex reciprocal system. Rockenschaub’s early works all represent half-abstract, peculiarly humorous shapes and objects that are reminiscent of pictograms, though neither legible nor interpretable; an alphabet devoid of semantic meaning and with strongly associative content. For the artist, painting is “a form of representation and a kind of game, a possibility to convey artistic meaning in a stereotypical, model-like form”, the effects of which can be heightened significantly through the connection with the space that surrounds it. Since the early Nineties, Rockenschaub has been exhibiting large-scale installations which occupy entire rooms. Apart from Plexiglas, he uses a variety of industrial materials and fabrics to realise these projects, such as particleboards, PVC-curtains, movable partition walls, monochromic carpets, inflatable objects shaped like couches, pillows and walls, shrink wrap, and, lastly, prefabricated metal scaffolds, just like those used in construction work. Rockenschaub’s procedure of “microsampling”, which involves picking out motifs and structures from magazines, trend magazines and commercials alludes to the way the media shapes and informs our environment – as well as the realization of the installations: They are designed on the computer and produced by machine.
At the Kunsthalle Bern Gerwald Rockenschaub will exhibit three new, large room installations in Bern, which were designed and developed using a meticulously calculated virtual Kunsthalle. They will enter into a suspenseful dialogue with five new animated movies as well as several existing works.
The Kunsthalle Bern prepares a book focusing on the work of the last four years by Gerwald Rockenschaub, with an Essay by Philippe Pirotte, published by Walther König Verlag, Köln.