ART AS A TRANSFORMATIVE PROCESS
ART AS A TRANSFORMATIVE PROCESS
“OBSERVER INVADER TRANSFORMER MUSIC FANATIC AESTHETE TRAVELER SELECTIVE CRITICAL HUMOROUS”
Clemens Hollerer was born in 1975 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria
An Austrian ultra-contemporary artist, who engages in different methods of construction and transformation with 17 years of experience in exhibiting internationally and collaborating with galleries and institutions. Originally trained in photography, Clemens Hollerer predominantly experiments with sculpture, painting and site-specific installation.
His works have roots in minimalism, conceptualism and architecture.
Clemens Hollerer’s main influential topics are architecture in transition, the psychological aspects of construction sites and transformation processes. He examines the notion of destruction in various forms, investigating guidance and limitation systems as well as people and their behavior patterns in urban space.
Working in a variety of mediums his art is characterized by its attention to detail and fast reactions to existing situations within an architectural setting.
Clemens appropriates existing, mainly minimal vocabularies and matches them with his own alerted perceptive systems, constructing a new matrix of elemental schemes. He follows ordinary forms, found geometries and structures, denoting their life and functioning within a given existing pattern of life and reality.
His greatest artistic influences stem from 1960s American Minimal Art. In addition, he has been guided by music, nature and fashion. Hollerer is also a dedicated follower of the work of several international architects.
His sculptures and paintings traverse a complex process of construction and deconstruction disclosing masterfully choreographed stages of transformation, whereas his subtle collages render and abstract excerpts from reality.
After a junior high school year as an exchange student in Pittsburgh/PA in 1992, Clemens became interested in minimalist architecture and space relations. During his youth he spent a lot of time traveling through the US learning about metropolitan cities and their structures.
In 1997 he graduated from the College for Tourism and Leisure Management in Bad Gleichenberg (Austria). He eventually stopped working in this industry, when the strong desire for freedom and creativity prevailed.
After attending the Prager Fotoschule in Austria (2001-2005), Clemens Hollerer enrolled in the postgraduate studies program of the Belgian HISK – Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp and Ghent (2006–2007). His period in Belgium kick-started a time of intense global travel. Exhibitions and projects took him all the way to New Zealand, the USA, Australia, the Philippines, Taiwan and numerous places in Europe. He was impressed by the works of Blinky Palermo, Gordon Matta-Clark, Fred Sandback and architects Tadao Ando, SANAA and Vincent van Duysen among others.
Today, he lives and works in a renovated farmhouse in Bad Gleichenberg in Southeast Austria, where he opened his studio ,MD.21’ in 2016.
Hollerer’s work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the US, including shows at the Pinchuk Art Center in Kiev (2010), the Palazzo Papadopoli in Venice in conjunction with the Venice Biennale (2011), the ACFNY - Austrian Cultural Forum New York (2011), Galerie Klueser 2 in Munich (2013) and the Galleria Enrico Astuni in Bologna (2014). His work is included in company and private collections. After nominations for the Zurich Art Prize and the Future Generation Art Prize in 2010, Clemens Hollerer received the Austrian State Scholarship for Fine Arts in 2014. He has been a member of the Vienna Secession since 2012.
With a perseverance imbued with brute force, he has worked his way through the potent heroes of Minimal Art and, especially here in this case, Land Art. Associations with Robert Smithson are evoked in the observations of the excavator machinery, while the scratched resin images echo with Gerhard Richter. With the sculptures positioned precisely in space Hollerer himself refers directly to the great icon (Blinky) Palermo. Hollerer’s approach is very much a conscious interaction with history and frequently reveals liberating features of post-hard core (music); in core resistive, his work is about – “despite” the burden of art history – recognising in it the continuum of creativity through reworking and destroying. As so often the case, ‘The birth and death of the day’ is inspired by Hollerer’s passion for rebellious music and taken from a song by the band ‘Explosions in the Sky’. As the title of a work that stands at the beginning of Hollerer’s exploration of the theme of machinery, birth and death are encapsulated into one single day and mirrored in the phenomenal creative and destructive force performed by the machinery. As birth and death simultaneously bear within them the virtually erotic promise of the new and the certain realisation of an end, Hollerer reveals the heady fact of an existence that perpetually metamorphoses.
- Katrin Bucher Trantow (Curator, Kunsthaus Graz - Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz, A - 2018) - On the occasion of the solo exhibition ‘The birth and death of the day’ at unttld contemporary, Vienna, A, 2018
Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, USA, 2023
Brussels, B, 2018
Amsterdam, NL, 2012
Palazzo Papadopoli, Venice, IT, 2011
Bad Gleichenberg, A, 2020
Bruck/Mur, A, 2009
Bad Gleichenberg, A, 2022
Bad Gleichenberg, A, 2020
Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, USA, 2023
Clemens Hollerer neither conquers the space nor embraces it with an intimate gesture. His ‚sculpture-in-action‘ oscillates between minute and fragile, hardly visible and ephemeral interventions into the urban fabric and monumental, large-scale constructions of a radical and invasive, quasi-architectural nature, always providing an impressive evidence of the artist’s critical and alerted perception of space and its formal and sensual qualities. Here, like in Perec, ‚space is what arrests our gaze, what our sight stumbles over: the obstacle, bricks, an angle, a vanishing point. Space is when it makes an angle, when it stops, when we have to turn for it to start off again’. Hollerer’s performative approach results in establishing dynamic sculptural situations that emphasize space’s vibration and instability and set up a viewer’s new, refreshing relationship of both disagreement and negotiation. Sharp edges and curves, sudden turns and uncontrolled twists, broken lines and irregular sequences constitute the substance of the artist’s seemingly solid structures and their porous surfaces. Hollerer’s temporary shelters are indeed subjective architectures of vulnerability - mazes of a dystopian self on a search for mathematical precision and geometric clarity, bridges of confictual realities, scaffoldings of impossible order. Always as if about to collapse, simultaneously violent and tender, these are edifices of ambiguity and rupture: parasitic yet supportive, zones of both entrapment and repose, oppression and escape. Encompassing a variety of influences, Hollerer’s (breathless, somehow punkish) poetics of space combines immediacy, spontaneity and instantaneousness, typical for photography (the artist’s principal training) with the rhythmical tempo, sequentiality and vividness, coming from Hollerer’s passion for music and live events that involve participation, relationality and interaction. His quasi-anarchic and perplexed installations are in fact kinetic paintings in a liberated space: voluminous surfaces, masterfully choreographed by a passionate follower of Palermo and Matta-Clark, framed within the abstract fields of interrupted lines, born to life by their colors and rough, industrial materials. Mimicking the (anti)form of the everyday (construction sites, public space’s security and support systems, street-work alteration and renovation labor), Hollerer questions the white cube’s paradigms and museological standards. Oversized and aggressive, too disturbing and hardly accessible, the artist’s often monstrous and impulsive structures act like unwanted guests of macabresque fairy tales, self-imposing their improvised presence within an always too conservative institutional frame. While critically mapping the claustrophobic space by an interplay of scale, dimension and volume and an oscillation between reduction and accumulation, they tease the viewer with their inappropriatness, lost innocence and nonbelonging thus turning a spatial experience into an imaginery journey through estranged landscapes of postapocalyptic ruin. Theatrical void and operatic plenty are features of Hollerer’s wounded space in blast and explosion. Such is the artist’s radical manifesto for a current world of a suspended disaster and precarious future. If, as it was recently speculated, following Carl Andre’s definition of sculpture (‚form equals structure equals place‘), Palermo’s definition of painting were ‚form equals structure equals place equals time‘, could Hollerer’s definition of spatial Gestalt be articulated as an organic conspiracy of form and structure towards a deconstructed place as a process-based act. Executed as a spontaneous unfolding of spatial and temporal narrative, Hollerer’s is Mallarmean graceful pacing of a meaning: random and obsessive, heterogenous and transitory.
- Adam Budak (Direktor, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, D) - 2011