About
When we say that something makes sense—that is interesting. But I do not want to make sense, because this sense is a definition made by somebody else.
—Rudolf Polanszky
Gagosian is pleased to present paintings and sculptures by Rudolf Polanszky dating from 2014 to 2019. This exhibition inaugurates his representation by the gallery.
An important contributor to the artistic landscape of Vienna, Polanszky makes cerebral multidisciplinary works that embrace chance occurrence. His fundamentally improvisational practice marries conceptual philosophies with varied modes of production, resulting in compositions that oscillate between dual identities as concrete objects and symbols of subjective perception.
Growing up in the immediate wake of the Viennese Actionist movement of the 1960s, Polanszky began his practice making satirical films, paintings, and performance art pieces that mischievously countered the Actionists’ graphic focus on living bodies in their own notorious performance works. To create his Sprungfedernzeichnungen (Coil Spring Drawings, 1983–85), for example, he bounced around a paper-covered room atop a large metal spring, wielding an elongated paintbrush in each hand, leaving behind painted and graphic traces of his uncontrolled motions.
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Rudolf Polanszky: Reconstructions
Gagosian director Ealan Wingate describes his first visit to Rudolf Polansky’s studio outside Vienna and discusses the development of the artist’s practice—from his early works informed by the legacy of the Viennese Actionists to the Reconstructions, an ongoing body of assemblage-type wall works and sculptures.
Rudolf Polanszky
Hans Ulrich Obrist visits the artist at his studio outside Vienna to discover more about the origins of his practice, his experiments in freedom, and the importance of drifting.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2019
The Winter 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a selection from Christopher Wool’s Westtexaspsychosculpture series on its cover.
News
Online Reading
Rudolf Polanszky
Rudolf Polanszky is available for online reading from July 1 through July 30 as part of Artist Spotlight: Rudolf Polanszky. Published on the occasion of his first exhibition with Gagosian, the book highlights recent paintings and sculptures by the Viennese artist dating from 2014 to 2019. To make his richly textured assemblages, Polanszky uses salvaged industrial materials such as acrylic glass, aluminum, mirrored foil, silicone, and wire, recombining them into purely aesthetic forms divorced from their original contexts. An essay by Francesco Stocchi considers the artist’s work in relation to the concept of the void, while an illuminating conversation with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist offers an overview of Polanszky’s career.
Rudolf Polanszky (New York: Gagosian, 2020)
Artist Spotlight
Rudolf Polanszky
July 1–7, 2020
An important contributor to the artistic landscape of Vienna, Rudolf Polanszky makes cerebral multidisciplinary works that embrace chance occurrence. His fundamentally improvisational practice marries conceptual philosophies with varied modes of production, resulting in compositions that oscillate between dual identities as concrete objects and symbols of subjective perception.
Photo: Xandra M. Linsin