Vernissage:  Thursday, 20 January 2011, 7 p.m.
Exhibition duration:   21 January 2011 – 6 March 2011
Venue: tresor at Bank Austria Kunstforum, Freyung 8, 1010 Vienna
www.bankaustria-kunstforum.at

An exhibition by KulturKontakt Austria, Bank Austria Kunstforum and Bank Austria UniCredit Group 

“I am interested in creating a situation in which a spectator balances on that borderline of space and creates a certain mental relation toward the space in which he/she finds himself/herself at the moment.” (Igor Eškinja)
 
Igor Eškinja, who was born in 1975 in Rijeka, studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia in Venice and has exhibited his works at Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain (2009), Federico Luger Gallery in Milan (2008) and Galerie Krobath Wimmer in Vienna (2007), to mention only a few; he is currently participating in the exhibition “A Vision of Central Europe” curated by Luc Tuyman, in the context of the Brugge Centraal festival in Bruges, Belgium.

Igor Eškinja’s spatial interventions oscillate between reality and imagination, materiality and immateriality. His artistic means are both simple and transitory: With the use of adhesive tape, electric wires or even dust and ashes, he places minimal, precise accents in an architectonic space. A street lamp appears as a silhouette on a wall; the contours of a swimming pool create the illusion of a hollow space; an ephemeral carpet of dust covers the gallery floor as an ornamental pattern that gradually disintegrates as more and more visitors walk over it. Igor Eškinja’s works are designed for specific places. In January 2011 he will react to a new space, the tresor at Bank Austria Kunstforum, with works conceived especially for it, thereby turning it into an integral part of his “architecture of perception”.
A comparable white cube situation was also the point of departure for his exhibition “Made in:side” at the Galleria Contemporaneo in Venice in 2009. With simple pieces of adhesive tape he constructed – or rather, drew – geometric constellations on the walls and floor. In the course of the perceptive process, these became imaginary volumes and were perceived as cartons. In a further step of the artistic process, the tension between the minimalist spatial references and the illusion they created was captured in photographs.
Eškinja’s ensembles are created at the crossroads between two-dimensional and three-dimensional form, with emptiness functioning as an active artistic element. His works cause the beholders to doubt the obvious and thereby phenomenologically make the beholders directly responsible, at least in part, for questioning their relationship to the visible world.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, to be published in February 2011 by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg. This will be the fourth volume of a catalogue series produced by KKA, Bank Austria and Bank Austria Kunstforum.

Curators: Heike Eipeldauer (Bank Austria Kunstforum), Annemarie Türk (KulturKontakt Austria)