ARTEXT : La Biennale di Venezia
53 Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte
Giardini di Castello - Austria

OBSERVATIONS
by Valie Export

[...] The selection of the artists for the 2009 Venice Biennial is the product of a wide range of considerations that, during the process of making the individual art projects concrete and my analysis of the work, also increasingly impacted on my own focus — whereby an abundance of personal thoughts and observations gradually accumulated.
They are also the product of an engagement with the content that I shall outline here from the perspective of my own objectives as an artist and an interest in current positions.

Venice, Spring 2009: The Austrian Pavilion is filled with scaffolding, ladders, tubs of paint and painting equipment for the expressive murals and wall drawings of Elke Krystufek, who is not only using the existing walls of the pavilion for her passages of text and sprawling drawn and painted portraits of male models that dominate the space. Additional blank walls have also been transported by lorry to Venice, where Elke Krystufek painted them with the impressive and expressive painterly gesture typical of her work, basing her images on photographs of a heterosexual male model taken at one of the artist's Vienna studios.
The image of the naked male is augmented by two pornographic photographs found in Venice of naked homosexual men — in typical 'feminine' poses.
By observing the unclad model Elke Krystufek transfers the historically fixed male gaze of female nudity in a structure of gaze and desire of opposites and contradictions.
The male nudes are involved in a dialogue with the smaller painted or drawn portraits of different men — who include Josef Hoffmann, the architect of the Austrian Pavilion, and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, whose film title
Tabu the artist has integrated in the title of her own installation TABOU TABOO (2009).

[.. continue.]

Curatori : Silvia Eiblmayr, Valie Export.

Artisti : Franziska & Weinberger | Krystufek | Margreiter.

Web site : http://www.labiennale.org/it/arte/