About
This is my hope—that I always get somewhere that I can’t find otherwise. Always try to find new ways. An unknown landscape. This is a very poetic effort. I think you often go into the fog and feel your way through.
—Rudolf Polanszky
Rudolf Polanszky was born in Vienna, where he grew up in the 1960s in the wake of the Viennese Actionists, a group of artists who staged notoriously graphic and often bloody actions and performances using people and animals. In his early work, Polanszky reacted against this movement by performing his own ironic actions. In one example from the 1980s, he attached paintbrushes, sponges dipped in paint, and colored pens to his body and then filmed himself as he moved around and rolled on the floor of a paper-covered room, producing paintings. In his Sprungfedernzeichnungen (Coil Spring Drawings) (1983–85), he propelled himself around the space of his studio atop a large metal spring, wielding an elongated paintbrush in each hand and leaving behind painted traces of his uncontrolled motions. For the Schlafbilder (Sleep Pictures) (1983), he wore a jumpsuit affixed with painting and drawing implements while he slept on the floor, allowing his slumbering state to illustrate his body’s kinetic patterns.
The 1990s marked an artistic turning point for Polanszky. During this period, he began creating canvas-mounted and freestanding assemblages by combining salvaged industrial materials—such as acrylic glass, aluminum, mirrored foil, resin, silicone, and wire—into new aesthetic forms, freeing them from their original contexts and uses. His term for this process of assemblage, “ad hoc synthesis,” reveals his enduring interest in combining conscious artistic strategy with the operation of random incident to generate new meaning. Polanszky has received solo museum exhibitions across Europe, including Translineare Strukturen (Translinear Structures), a 2015 retrospective at Zeit Kunst Niederösterreich, Krems, Austria; and Eidola, an exhibition of his recent work at the Secession, Vienna, in 2018. Polanszky lives and works in Vienna.
Photo: Xandra M. Linsin
#RudolfPolanszky
Rudolf Polanszky: Reconstructions
Gagosian director Ealan Wingate describes his first visit to Rudolf Polansky’s studio outside Vienna and discusses the development of the artist’s practice—from his early works informed by the legacy of the Viennese Actionists to the Reconstructions, an ongoing body of assemblage-type wall works and sculptures.
Rudolf Polanszky
Hans Ulrich Obrist visits the artist at his studio outside Vienna to discover more about the origins of his practice, his experiments in freedom, and the importance of drifting.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2019
The Winter 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a selection from Christopher Wool’s Westtexaspsychosculpture series on its cover.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
Art Basel Miami Beach 2022
December 1–3, 2022, booth D5
Miami Beach Convention Center
artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to present a selection of modern and contemporary works at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Returning to Miami for the fair’s twentieth anniversary, the gallery is honored to have participated each year the fair has been held.
Gagosian’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Artwork, left to right: © Gerhard Richter; © Amoako Boafo; © Richard Prince; © 2022 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation; © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Stanley Whitney. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Art Fair
Art Basel Hong Kong 2022
May 27–29, 2022, booth 1C15
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
www.artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong 2022 with an ensemble of contemporary works by international artists. The gallery’s presentation will feature works by artists including Georg Baselitz, Louise Bonnet, Edmund de Waal, Urs Fischer, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Jennifer Guidi, Simon Hantaï, Hao Liang, Damien Hirst, Thomas Houseago, Tetsuya Ishida, Alex Israel, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Rick Lowe, Takashi Murakami, Albert Oehlen, Nam June Paik, Giuseppe Penone, Rudolf Polanszky, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, Jim Shaw, Rudolf Stingel, Spencer Sweeney, Rachel Whiteread, and Zeng Fanzhi.
Gagosian’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong 2022. Artwork, left to right: © Georg Baselitz; © Louise Bonnet; © Zeng Fanzhi; © 2019 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved; © Rudolf Stingel. Photo: Martin Wong
Art Fair
West Bund Art & Design 2020
November 12–15, 2020, booth A102
West Bund Art Center, Shanghai
westbundshanghai.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in West Bund Art & Design 2020 with an extensive group presentation. Along with the gallery’s booth at ART021 Shanghai, on view between November 14 and 15, this will be Gagosian’s first in-person art fair since the covid-19 lockdown in March. The gallery’s participation was made possible by extraordinary support from the artists involved.
Hao Liang, Spring and Fall, 2020 © Hao Liang
Museum Exhibitions
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Rudolf Polanszky in
Discrete Austrian Secrets
November 17, 2019–March 31, 2020
Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chongqing, China
www.artlinkart.com
Discrete Austrian Secrets presents thirty-two contemporary Austrian artists exhibiting spatial interventions, sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, and sound and video art. Work by Rudolf Polanszky is included.
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Rudolf Polanszky
Eidola
February 9–April 22, 2018
Secession, Vienna
www.secession.at
Rudolf Polanszky’s solo exhibition brings together sculptures and pictorial reliefs from various ensembles the artist has worked on during the last decade. Providing insight into his world of ideas, these works exemplify the artist’s nonlinear, improvised process of piecing together found materials and accidental forms, which he describes as “ad hoc synthesis.”
Installation view, Rudolf Polanszky: Eidola, Secession, Vienna, February 9–April 22, 2018. Artwork © Rudolf Polanszky. Photo: Peter Mochi
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Rudolf Polanszky
Paradox Transformations
December 15, 2015–February 20, 2016
Museo Madre, Naples, Italy
www.madrenapoli.it
This exhibition presents more than twenty works on canvas and sculptures produced by Rudolf Polanszky between the 1990s and 2015 that explore the relationship between abstraction and the space of human action. Since the 1990s Polanszky has created canvas-mounted and freestanding assemblages by combining salvaged industrial materials into new aesthetic forms, freeing them from their original contexts and uses. The works in this exhibition reflect his enduring interest in creating structure and form from repurposed materials.
Rudolf Polanszky, Rohrschach Transformations, 2010 © Rudolf Polanszky. Photo: Stefan Lux
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Rudolf Polanszky
Translineare Strukturen
May 30–October 18, 2015
Zeit Kunst Niederösterreich, Dominikanerkirche Krems, Austria
esel.at
Installed in the historic Dominikanerkirche Krems, this retrospective exhibition, whose title translates to “Translinear Structures,” surveys Rudolf Polanszky’s body of work, from his conceptual film and photography documenting actions in the 1980s to his more recent paintings and sculpture, which reflect the artist’s ongoing engagement with philosophy, mathematics, and epistemology, articulated through abstract and poetic visual forms.
Installation view, Rudolf Polanszky: Translineare Strukturen, Zeit Kunst Niederösterreich, Dominikanerkirche Krems, Austria, May 30–October 18, 2015. Artwork © Rudolf Polanszky. Photo: Christoph Fuchs