Artist Spotlight
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.
Created in response to the covid-19 pandemic, the Artist Spotlight series highlights individual artists, one week at a time, whose exhibitions have been affected by the health crisis. A single artwork by the artist is made available with pricing information for forty-eight hours only.
Artist Spotlight: Rudolf Polanszky features a work from his first exhibition with Gagosian, which opened briefly in New York prior to the current shutdown. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.
#GagosianSpotlight
Photo: Xandra M. Linsin
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.
Related News
Video
Rudolf Polanszky: Translinear Structures
KA21/Cast Your Art
Rudolf Polanszky speaks about his art in this video from KA21, produced on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition presented by Zeit Kunst Niederösterreich in 2015. Installed in a historical church in Krems, Austria, the exhibition reflected the artist’s ongoing engagement with philosophy, mathematics, and epistemology, articulated through abstract and poetic visual forms.
Still from “Rudolf Polanszky: Translinear Structures”
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)
Art Fair
Art Basel Miami Beach 2022
December 1–3, 2022, booth D5
Miami Beach Convention Center
artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to present a selection of modern and contemporary works at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Returning to Miami for the fair’s twentieth anniversary, the gallery is honored to have participated each year the fair has been held.
Gagosian’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Artwork, left to right: © Gerhard Richter; © Amoako Boafo; © Richard Prince; © 2022 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation; © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Stanley Whitney. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Museum Exhibitions
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Rudolf Polanszky in
Discrete Austrian Secrets
November 17, 2019–March 31, 2020
Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chongqing, China
www.artlinkart.com
Discrete Austrian Secrets presents thirty-two contemporary Austrian artists exhibiting spatial interventions, sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, and sound and video art. Work by Rudolf Polanszky is included.
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Rudolf Polanszky
Eidola
February 9–April 22, 2018
Secession, Vienna
www.secession.at
Rudolf Polanszky’s solo exhibition brings together sculptures and pictorial reliefs from various ensembles the artist has worked on during the last decade. Providing insight into his world of ideas, these works exemplify the artist’s nonlinear, improvised process of piecing together found materials and accidental forms, which he describes as “ad hoc synthesis.”
Installation view, Rudolf Polanszky: Eidola, Secession, Vienna, February 9–April 22, 2018. Artwork © Rudolf Polanszky. Photo: Peter Mochi
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Rudolf Polanszky
Paradox Transformations
December 15, 2015–February 20, 2016
Museo Madre, Naples, Italy
www.madrenapoli.it
This exhibition presents more than twenty works on canvas and sculptures produced by Rudolf Polanszky between the 1990s and 2015 that explore the relationship between abstraction and the space of human action. Since the 1990s Polanszky has created canvas-mounted and freestanding assemblages by combining salvaged industrial materials into new aesthetic forms, freeing them from their original contexts and uses. The works in this exhibition reflect his enduring interest in creating structure and form from repurposed materials.
Rudolf Polanszky, Rohrschach Transformations, 2010 © Rudolf Polanszky. Photo: Stefan Lux
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Rudolf Polanszky
Translineare Strukturen
May 30–October 18, 2015
Zeit Kunst Niederösterreich, Dominikanerkirche Krems, Austria
esel.at
Installed in the historic Dominikanerkirche Krems, this retrospective exhibition, whose title translates to “Translinear Structures,” surveys Rudolf Polanszky’s body of work, from his conceptual film and photography documenting actions in the 1980s to his more recent paintings and sculpture, which reflect the artist’s ongoing engagement with philosophy, mathematics, and epistemology, articulated through abstract and poetic visual forms.
Installation view, Rudolf Polanszky: Translineare Strukturen, Zeit Kunst Niederösterreich, Dominikanerkirche Krems, Austria, May 30–October 18, 2015. Artwork © Rudolf Polanszky. Photo: Christoph Fuchs