In Rahmenbedingung Austrian artist Marlene Hausegger marries photography and silk screen printing with an objet trouvé from the window manufacturing industry to relate stories of urban legacies and Renaissance movements.
With Marlene Hausegger (AT)
Every year our sponsor Gaulhofer Industrie-Holding GmbH opens his company and invites an artist to create an object for the festival centre. At the centre of Hausegger’s work is a photo taken by the artist in Detroit in a disused factory of American carmaker Packard. The economic downturn in conjunction with the sales crisis afflicting the automobile industry has radically changed the urban reality of the once burgeoning industrial city of Detroit. Some 85,000 houses have been abandoned, the number of inhabitants has slumped and two years ago Detroit was forced to file for bankruptcy. And yet the city’s art and music scene is thriving and investors are beginning to return, giving rise to one of Detroit’s many nicknames – Renaissance City.
In front of the picture we find a perspective drawing by Leon Battista Alberti. In his art historic treatise De Pictura (On Painting, 1436) this Italian scholar demonstrated how perspective can be used to create the illusion of depth within the frame of a picture. Alberti’s synthesis of art and architecture turned painting into a window of enlightenment offering views of a new world that was beginning to take shape during the Renaissance.
In Marlene Hausegger’s work the perspective lines no longer give the impression of depth; they are fronting the photo, thus breaking up the classical frame of the picture.
Commissioned by steirischer herbst
Rahmenbedingung was made possible by the sponsonring-partnership between steirischer herbst and Gaulhofer Industrie-Holding, which invited artist Marlene Hausegger to use workplace material to react to this year's festival leitmotif.