09/2009 SCHNEE VON MORGEN
sculptures, texts, drawings, pictures, installations by Heinz Baumüller
September 18 - November 17, 2009
I am the state. This declaration of the absolutistic monarch Louis XIV might apply to the artist Heinz Baumüller too – obviously to be read in a reverse sense: The cited sentence – classifying the Roi Soleil as a despot – might apply to anyone of us according to Heinz Baumüller, this former collaborator of Joseph Beuys, an Austrian living in Düsseldorf for nearly thirty years now. The citizen, the human being, the artist is the sovereign, is a political being, his or her work a political statement. Heinz Baumüller takes a stand. Through his actions, installations, sculptures, photo documentaries, posters, pictures and texts – in public space, in non-artistic surroundings like a former rocket base, a monastic cell or campaigns for the election of the Austrian Federal President as in sculpture conventions or galleries too.
From September 18 to November 17, 2009, the ZS art KunstRaum offers to Heinz Baumüller’s peculiar, lusty form of social criticism for the first time since 1992 a platform in Vienna. In SCHNEE VON MORGEN Heinz Baumüller presents a show made of texts, pictures, drawings, installations and sculptures asking for reflection and interpretation. At first glance contradictory and ambiguous, at second glance ironically profound Baumüller’s amiably anarchistic works trigger a chain of associations and possible reactions in the recipient’s mind. With a wink and enjoying his inspiring non-sense the artist unmasks platitudes, usual habits, patterns of thinking, superficial worn-out commonplaces. Through his method of the minimalistic, graphically precise, but on an ideological level sustainable intervention on the given and ordinary Heinz Baumüller first makes his audience smile, then frown. The ironic aphorisms, disarming neologisms and sculptures of the never tiring freethinker Heinz Baumüller sharpen our sense of freedom and self-responsibility. Two small points turn banality into a truly lapidary statement. Irony and humour are the artist’s major tools to open up his world of liberal and deeply human values to the intellectually open-minded observer. Baumüller moves further along the individualistic and critical way his teacher Joseph Beuys pranced on throughout his entire life as an artist – in his very own aesthetic manner.
In SCHNEE VON MORGEN Heinz Baumüller vehemently calls once more for the recipient’s reflections. His puristic, symbolic œuvre reaches completeness only through the obersver’s reaction. The silent dialogue between work and beholder gets transformed into a whirling exchange of thoughts. Even successfully cultivated surrenders without conditions.
Press release >
Biography Heinz Baumüller >
"1 Kanal TV", 1986 >
"Babylonische Schreibmaschine", 2003-07 >
Schriftblatt: "Die Würde des Menschen" >