Heinrich Dunst: Un-hierarchical Image Fields and Conceptual Art Installation at Secession

This exhibition by Austrian artist Heinrich Dunst features a new installation at the Secession that explores the gap between the visible and the sayable. Through a wall intervention and various media elements, Dunst constructs an un-hierarchical image field questioning the interface between embodiment and representation.

The Austrian artist Heinrich Dunst engages with the space between the visible and the sayable, the untranslatability of one form into another, and the contextuality of spatial presentations in his interventions and performances. For the Secession, Dunst developed a new installation organized by a wall that diagonally divides the exhibition space, functioning as a hypertext carrier. He constructs an un-hierarchical image field from various media elements, including letters made of insulation material, monochrome paintings, altered everyday objects, an Ottoman miniature painting, and copies related to the hand, with a central motif of showing and the associated question of the interface between embodiment and representation. The two titular letters D and A explicitly demonstrate this, appearing as sculptures leaning against the wall, asserting their immediate existence, while simultaneously understood as a word, they symbolically point to something else, absent. Dunst explores the various semantic assignments, letting them oscillate between the material and the conceptual, language and image. His arrangements can be read as sovereign written signs, sculptural objects, traces of the artist's subject, and are situated in perceptual relation to their spatial surroundings. The roots of Dunst's conceptual approach lie in artistic positions that examine word and image perception, such as Marcel Broodthaers, and in the Viennese scene of the 1980s, which sought to extend abstract painting into exhibition spaces. Dunst brings these questions to new relevance by developing assignments from forms and critically questioning the clarity of elements through variation, superposition, and changes in direction. Curator Vanessa Joan Müller notes his specific mode of activating context through spatial arrangement, emphasizing slight deviations from quotations, cuts and counter-cuts, or the juxtapositions of conflicting concepts, leading to constant re-readings that can be imagined as a form of reading and excerpting, underlining and leafing, transformed into aesthetic objects.

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