Galerie im Taxispalais

THOMAS FEUERSTEIN

PSYCHOPROSA

In his exhibition PSYCHOPROSA, Austrian artist Thomas Feuerstein (*1968 in Innsbruck, lives in Vienna) employs biochemical processes as a means of artistic expression and creates an installation at the interface of art and a natural scientific experimental set-up. He transforms the spaces of the Galerie im Taxispalais into a coherent ensemble of greenhouse, laboratory, cooling chamber and factory. Pipes meander through the exhibition, linking apparatuses and objects. Using algae and fungi, a synthetic hallucinogen is generated through a chemical process, and at the same time a viscous slime is produced. Thick threads and streaks of this form a transparent, liquid sculpture. The psychotropic effect of the hallucinogenic substance – which causes solid objects to deliquesce in our perception – is reflected as a real process; the inner world of the psyche and the external world of the polymer slime begin to overlap. Thomas Feuerstein works in different media such as sculpture and installation, graphic art, painting, photography and net art, creating multilayered references to biology, the philosophy of science, economics, and cultural history in the process. By interlocking the factual and the fictive, he deconstructs scientific explanatory models' claim to truth and prompts new contexts of meaning to evolve.  

In cooperation with the Frankfurter Kunstverein and the Kunstverein Heilbronn


Catalogue
Texts (Germ./Engl.) by Beate Ermacora, Thomas Feuerstein, Jürgen Tabor and a conversation between Graham Harman and Thomas Feuerstein
200 pages, numerous colour illustrations; Snoeck Verlag, Köln Cologne 2015