Sitename

Vitus Weh

DEMON THEATRE
On walk-in gardens, blocks of works and the relational in art

Under the title "DEMON THEATRE. Michael Vonbank makes the puppets dance in the collection", the Museum Angerlehner is showing a comprehensive solo presentation of the painter, draughtsman, sculptor and writer Michael Vonbank from the beginning of April to the end of September 2022. In the exhibition, conceived as a theatre of stations, the artist opens up deep insights into the spectacle of inner transformation through his work. His chimeras or grotesques explore our existence in permanent transformation between being human, demon and animal. In this, Michael Vonbank's art shows parallels both to the symbolist painting of the Belgian James Ensor (1860-1949) and to the cybernetic vision as formulated by the US theorist Donna Haraway in "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985): Man, long since no longer the "crown of creation", is transforming more and more towards a complex mixture of animal and machine, until finally the natural and artificial species dissolve into each other. Vonbank's poetic, sometimes macabre approach and his courage to put the larvae and pupae of life directly into the picture are connected with James Ensor's mask paintings.

Blocks of work and walk-in demon gardens
In the exhibition, Michael Vonbank's ghosts and demons were formed into polyphonic choirs for the first time. With the help of large blocks of works, the energy of the individual images was bundled and the space was interwoven with these fields of force. Two further groups of works, which operate on the border between spatial painting and sculpture, were made accessible as "demon gardens".

Contemporary departure from "authorial genius" towards the relational
The selection of works and spatial design focused on the narrative and dialogical foundation in the artistic work of Michael Vonbank, who, in addition to his demon paintings, also created numerous literary typefaces, as well as collaborative works with various artist colleagues time and again. Both approaches show Michael Vonbank as a forerunner of contemporary thinking, which is increasingly moving away from the genius-oriented notion of an autonomous author and instead emphasising the omnipresence of the relational and the power of the cooperative.

Collective works and "image conversations"
The exhibition therefore not only presents some impressive series of the aforementioned collaborative works - with Christian Ludwig Attersee, among others - but also continues this dialogical principle with specially arranged "picture conversations" with artworks from the museum's holdings (by Guenter Brus, Karl Korab, Assunta Abdel Azim Mohamed, Arnulf Rainer, Bianca Regl, Volker Stelzmann and Otto Zitko, among others), which have been set in dialogue with pictures by Michael Vonbank. In the sequence of these conversation scenes, walk-in gardens and force fields, a course unfolds in the exhibition space like a station drama. In the spirit of Michael Vonbank, an immersive setting was planned in which the visitors also become protagonists.

This text was published in the catalog "Michael Vonbank. Demon Theatre. Works 1986 - 2015. An Overview" Edited by Beate Sprenger with texts by Christian Ludwig Attersee, Daniela Gregori, Lucas Gehrmann, Anton Herzl, Margareta Sandhofer, Beate Sprenger, Florian Steininger, Michael Vonbank and Vitus Weh. Verlag fuer moderne Kunst, Wien 2022 ISBN: 978-3-9035-7269-9