top of page

BMCA at the Parallel Sculpture Park 2024

BMCA is pleased to present sculpture commissions with Nikola Milojcevic and Red Huemer alongside works by Erik Tannhäuser and Han Feng at the third edition of the Parallel Sculpture Park. Taking place in the picturesque park around Villa Toscana at the northern end of Lake Traunsee, the Sculpture Park is organized as part of the art fair and exhibition platform Parallel Vienna and the historic, year-round cultural festival Salzkammergut Festwochen Gmunden. This year, as the European Capital of Culture, the Salzkammergut region, with its program connecting historical and contemporary art and culture, gives special significance to the Parallel Sculpture Park, which presents artists, institutions and galleries from all over Austria and Europe.

image.png
image.png

Villa Toscana, with sculpture by Martin Grandits, © Xenia Snapiro

Nikola Milojcevic studied at the Academy for Applied Photography Graz, where he developed analog photography with heightened haptic qualities. Another important part of Milojcevic's work is sculptures that place junk art in a critical context. In a characteristic process of hammering, welding, pressing, cutting, and grinding, the artist formally and ontologically transforms the metal pieces found in the scrapyard. Less concerned with artistic autonomy than with the potential of sculpture as a critical medium, Milojcevic places the transfigured industrial materials in an exhibition setting that invites appreciation and reflection. Milojcevic's newly unveiled sculptures at Vienna's summer riverside venue, Summerstage, draw on the contrast between the breezy environment of the Danube Canal and the metallic industrial materials.

image.png
image.png

Nikola Milojcevic, Soft Packs, 2024, studio view.

In a memento to the cigarette label Drina, which has been sold in the same design since his childhood, Nikola Milojcevic chose Soft Packs (2024) for his BMCA commission. In the form of stubbed out cigarettes and soft packs, the reminiscence operates on two levels: the aesthetic object built from industrial scrap, and the disappearing sight of a machine once ubiquitous in the urban landscape. In the artist's studio, the cigarette vending machine in the background is covered with an advertisement for the Memphis Sky-Blue, depicting an airplane with the text "High Level Taste!". The ad lends a touch of irony to the duality of the industrial scrap that breaks its lifecycle and the cigarettes sales, once bathed in old Hollywood glamour, now fading from urban memory.

Red Huemer similarly collects and appropriates found materials, but combines formal experimentation with a sensitivity to the tensions and contradictions in material and technique, and further blends social criticism with humor and playfulness. Involved in Vienna's electronic music scene and a former professional basketball player, Huemer's interest in contemporary culture extends to his artistic work. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the class of Prof. Julian Göthe. In IKEA Pseudo Punk Wardrobe (2023), for example, Huemer turns the showroom of Scandinavian modern design and global mass consumption into a playground by pulling himself up on the enlarged safety pins attached to the tops of clothes racks; the artist poses with a shopping cart turned fashion accessory on a display stand.

In his commissioned work The Moment before Dropping in (2024), Huemer depicts a skateboarder's moment of suspension, right at the tip of their balance, before entering the Nikola Milojcevic, Soft Packs, 2024, studio view. quarterpipe. The red outline of the figure stands out against the 4.5-meter-high black structure and the tranquil surroundings of Toscana Park. An encounter of thrill and fear.

Screenshot 2024-06-21 at 10.58.26.png

Red Huemer, RESTLESS LEGS SYNDROM, 2024 Metal,

Photo: Sasa Felsbach

image_edited.png

Red Huemer, The Moment before Dropping in, 2024, winded 3mm metal, ramp; work sample and sketch.

8af3fbac-12d6-408f-a28e-de69cf09b730 2.jpg

Turning attention from the human experience to the natural environment, Erik Tannhäuser's rusting panels depict the animals found on country roads - hare, heron, and fish - and their habitat. Tafelbilder (Hase, Reiher, Fische, 2024) continues Tannhäuser's rusting technique and critique of violence and oppression both within and beyond the human world. In 2017, during the 14th Documenta in Kassel, Germany, Tannhäuser partnered with Amnesty International to present the Fountain against Torture. The interactive sculpture calls attention to human rights and denounces oppressive politics.

image.png
image.png

Erik Tannhäuser, Tafelbilder (Hase, Reiher, Fische), 2024.

In the series of Tafelbilder, Tannhäuser focuses on another vulnerable group, the wild animals whose habits are crossed by road surfaces. The artist brings animals found dead on the road to his studio and immortalizes their image on a sheet of metal, surrounded by the plants of their environment, which undergo a similar transformation on the metal. The ephemeral and dynamic interaction between the metal sheet, air, and water is central to Erik Tannhäuser, Tafelbilder (Hase, Reiher, Fische), 2024. Red Huemer, The Moment before Dropping in, 2024, winded 3mm metal, ramp; work sample and sketch. both the technical process of rusting and the resulting memorial to life that places the animals in their environment to drift, hop, and float.

image.png

Han Feng, Somewhere, Gmunden, 2021. Hipp Halle Gmunden

image.png

Han Feng brings to life yet another kind of material: everyday objects, often found in flea markets, reduced to abstract forms and reconstructed with branches and canvas. It is the very absence of these objects that floats in space. Han cites Taoist philosophy as an inspiration for the question of presence and absence as response to the dichotomy of subject and object in art. Han turns the color of paint into artistic subject and the canvas into things in their own right. The art critic Jörg Huber describes Han’s work as “objects with the effect of pictures that have entered space.”1

 

First presented at Hipp Halle, Somewhere, Gmunden (2021) links the philosophical and conceptual questions in Han’s work to the environment of Gmunden, specifically his long walks along the Traun River, after the artist moved from Shanghai to Berlin. The slender branches serve as the canvas stretchers and at the same time, as a backbone of the uncanny presence of things.

 

In the work of these four artists, sculpture takes its shape through mechanical fabrication, playful mimesis, traces of animal bodies, and conceptual (re)construction. Regardless of the different approaches, the man-made and natural environment evokes and is projected with rich sensual, emotional, and intellectual experiences, be it nostalgia, anxiety, adoration or curiosity. Indeed, valuable additions to the annual motto of the Salzkammergut Festwochen Gmunden, Central Questions, Great Emotions.

 

Across the Toscana Park, the works are joined by those of promising young talents and internationally renowned artists, whose central questions often resonate. Notably, Martin Grandits, presented by Galerie Krinzinger/Parallel Vienna, approaches issues of consumption and identity with witty satire. Angelika Lorderer’s (Galerie Sophie Han Feng, Somewhere, Gmunden, 2021, at Hipp Halle Gmunden. Tappeiner) ongoing exhibition at Belvedere 21, Soil Fictions, envisions a posthuman gathering of beings on the soil as a “common ground.” Presented by Parallel Vienna, Gisela Stiegler’s cross-discplinary work revisions techniques in art historical movements, while Heimo Zobernig embeds artistic objects in the history of art, design, and architecture, with a particular focus on the visible and the hidden in the form and ideology of modernism. Parallel Sculpture Park 2024 opens on 28 June, and runs through 31 August. The park is open to the public during the exhibition period. Guided tours are offered on 13 and 27 July, and 10 and 24 August. The Salzkammergut Festwochen Gmunden and the European Cultural Capital, Bad Ischl offer additional artistic programs, including Gmunden Photo, open-air concerts, and events organized by the University of Art Linz.

image.png

Parallel Sculpture Park.

image.png

Gert Resinger, WET

1 Jörg Huber, “In front of Han Feng’s pictures: Approximations,” trans. Benjamin Marius Schmidt, http://www.artlinkart.com/en/article/overview/22dcwunq/about_by2/H/60dcrwum.

List of artists and exhibitors

Roland Adlassnigg (Galerie Lisi Hämmerle)

Walter Angerer-Niketa (ZS Art Galerie)

Joannis Avramidis (Galerie Crone)

Jürgen Buchinger (Kunstuniversität Linz)

Christian Eisenberger (Galerie Krinzinger)

Han Feng (BMCA)

Judith P. Fischer (ZS Art Galerie)

Bruno Gironcoli (Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman)

Sofia Goscinski (Parallel Vienna)

Franz Graf (Parallel Vienna)

Martin Grandits (Galerie Krinzinger / Parallel Vienna)

Begi Guggenheim (Parallel Vienna)

Thomas Gänszler (Galerie Sturm und Schober)

Alfred Haberpointner (Galerie 422)

Hubertus Hamm (Kornfeld Galerie Berlin)

Xenia Hausner (Galerie 422)

Red Huemer (BMCA / Parallel Vienna)

Ma Jia (gezwanzig Contemporary Showcase Gallery)

Julian Khol (Parallel Vienna)

Michael Kienzer (Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman)

Isabella Kohlhuber (ARTOSPHÄRE)

Brigitte Kowanz (Galerie Krinzinger)

Merlin Kratky (Parallel Vienna)

George Kubla (Parallel Vienna)

Angelika Loderer (Galerie Sophie Tappeiner)

Marko Lulić (Parallel Vienna)

Roland Maurmair (Parallel Vienna)

Nikola Milojcevic (BMCA / Parallel Vienna)

Viktoria Morgenstern (Galerie Rudolf Leeb)

Aleksandar Murkovic (Kunstuniversität Linz)

Irina Müller (Kunstuniversität Linz)

Alexandar Peev (Parallel Vienna)

Eva Petrič (Galerie Rudolf Leeb)

Robert Puczynski (Galerie Jünger)

Gert Resinger (Parallel Vienna)

Elisabeth von Samsonow (Galerie Jünger)

Olga Shapovalova (Parallel Vienna)

Martin Sommer (Parallel Vienna)

Gisela Stiegler (Parallel Vienna)

Erik Tannhäuser (BMCA)

Federico Vecchi (Parallel Vienna)

Anna Weberberger (Kunstuniversität Linz)

Amrei Wittwer (Galerie Lisi Hämmerle)

Clemens Wolf (Parallel Vienna)

Heimo Zobernig (Parallel Vienna)

image.png

Toscana Park Gmunden, image: Parallel Vienna.

TEXT: YIZHUO LI 李艺卓
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • wechat icon copy
bottom of page