Galerie im Taxispalais

Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch

Raum für 17 Minuten

On the occasion of the 32nd Austrian Graphic Art Competition, the Galerie im Taxispalais is introducing a new exhibition format, which will also be retained in the future. An individual exhibition is being devoted to the main prize-winners of the last competition, thus showing the prize-winning works in the context of their artistic œuvre.

In 2009 the top prize in the 31st Austrian Graphic Art Competition was awarded to the artist duo Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch for their series of three digital drawings Untitled (South Pole), 2007. In the exhibition this group of works will be complemented by the series on paper Untitled (North Pole), 2007 and the video Fog, 2007. Each of the six drawings on the North and South Poles consists of a single, delicately drawn line with a different length and winding course on the white paper. These lines reproduce, true to scale, the individual routes of polar explorers. Despite the minimal use of graphic means, they trigger compelling associations with white polar landscapes and create a vivid image of the competition to reach the poles, which was not only a matter of honour and prominence, but also of life and death. The basis for the drawings were travel reports by expedition leaders Julius Payer (expedition land commander of the Austrian-Hungarian expedition to the North Pole 1872-1874), Fridtjof Nansen, Salomon August Andrée (North Pole) and Ernest Henry Shackleton, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott (South Pole), who set out bravely on their voyages of discovery to the ends of the earth with a range of equipment and using the latest technology, but with completely inadequate knowledge of the climatic conditions. Six and Petritsch have placed the video Fog alongside the drawings, which shows a person wandering around lost in thick mist, attempting to find his bearings. Polar explorers have repeatedly described the so-called ‘whiteout’, whereby one completely loses one’s orientation in a uniform white desert due to a diffuse light from all directions. Apparently, initial euphoria gives way to an extremely sobering effect and may even lead to death, as in the case of participants in the expedition led by Salomon August Andrée, who set off in a gas-filled balloon in 1897; their photographs were not found until 1930. However, the video is not only legible in this historical context; it can also be interpreted as a general metaphor of man’s orientation in time and space.

As the exhibition in the Galerie im Taxispalais is set up, the new performative work Room for 17 Minutes will evolve; it gives the exhibition its title and represents the heart of the presentation. It fits smoothly into the consistent, conceptually based œuvre of Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch, who sound out existential situations in a performative way. The conceptual starting point is the American short film Film (1965) based on a screenplay by Samuel Beckett, in which the watching camera is incorporated into the film as an actor, so playing with the perspectives of the viewer and the viewed. Here, the artist duo translates the unavoidability of self-perception and the fact that we cannot escape our own existence into a filmic situation.

Nicole Six (*1971 in Vöcklabruck), Paul Petritsch (*1968 in Friesach); both live in Vienna and have been working together since 1997.
Individual exhibitions: 2010 Atlas, Secession, Vienna; 2007 I’m too tired to tell you, Agentur, Amsterdam; 2006 Nicole Six und Paul Petritsch, Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst, Bremen; Longitude / Latitude, haaaach, Klagenfurt.
Group exhibitions (selection): 2011 Proposals For Venice, Landesgalerie Linz; 2010 Blind Date, Kunstverein Hanover; Heimat/Domovina, Museum Moderner Kunst Klagenfurt; 2009 Reading the City, ev+a 2009, Limerick.