Klaus Mosettig

Nature morte

The works by Klaus Mosettig (born 1975 in Graz, lives and works in Vienna) are mostly based on a time-intensive, processual praxis. Examples of these are his several year-long and exact documentations of apple tree cultivations or the meticulously exact “projector portraits”: large-scale drawings of empty beams of light thrown on a screen by unloaded slide projectors, by which the picture’s dependence on a device becomes visible as much as the surge of “nature” that accompanies every form of cultural perception and construction. For Kunstraum Dornbirn, Klaus Mosettig has developed a new installation in reference to the site, which turns the architecture of the turbine assembly hall into an essential protagonist. “Nature morte”, the French term for still life, designates the static moment that is fundamental to pictures and by which, in its own way, is able to show us the world re-invented. By a reversal, Klaus Mosettig succeeds on focusing on this moment itself. In a five-month operation of naturalistic drawing, he probed an abstract composition by Jackson Pollock, which like almost no other is identified with nature and vitality, and brought it, as it were, to a standstill. The precision with which Mosettig translated Pollock’s composition into a finely nuanced web of dark shimmery graphite hatchings not only applies a diametrically opposed production speed to the source material, but also has a decelerating affect on our perception. A viewer’s close look at the drawing requires a slow-downed regard, which wanders over the microscopic territories of the picture, whereby a not unessential part of the deceleration effect consists in the fact that in recapitulating the manual charcoal traces, a part of the time invested in the work is once more made evident. At the same time, the exhibition questions the working and distribution economics of contemporary art. Indeed, although the process of graphic interpretation remains a procedure exclusive to the artist who undertakes it, the access to art or the dissemination of art via the one-to-one reproduction in the catalogue confers a form of democratization, one that is even more expanded in that everyone receives an issue of the publication on entry (while supplies last).