Tone Fink

KUNSTFORUMABB.UMARBEITUNGEN of the 1980s

Opening: Monday, January 13th 2014
Exhibition: January 14th 2014 – February 22nd 2014

Gallery Hrobsky is proud to open the exhibition programm of 2014 with a solo show presenting works by Tone Fink, who celebrates his 70th birthday on January 1st, 2014. The show will contain a series of works from the 1980s, never before presented to the public, titled KUNSTFORUMABB.UMARBEITUNGEN.

Tone Fink’s oeuvre is beyond any categorisation. The artist, born in Vorarlberg in the Austrian Alps, studied painting and graphics at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He moves through different media and techniques with ease, his multifaceted oeuvre contains drawings, objects, works on canvas, short films, performances and installations.

Drawing as a medium is a sort of leitmotif in Tone Fink’s work. His drawings originate spontaneously and unplanned, the artist works in a direct and intuitive way. They are the outlet for his creative urges and serve as sketches for performances and objects. Full of wit and irony they provide an insight into the overflowing personal cosmos of the artist, whose overwhelming creativity and fantasy are also expressed in his love for creating new words and puns.

Tone Fink’s affinity for drawing and his love for books can also be felt in his sculptural pieces, where he often uses paper as a plastic material. But make no mistake: The objects he thereby creates are by no means fragile – Fink uses the papier mâché to build solid forms that are often blurring the line between sculpture and design, between art and everyday objects. The artist uses these objects not only in the context of an exhibition, but also for his inventive performances.

KUNSTFORUMABB.UMARBEITUNGEN is a series of drawings and watercolors on the pages of the German art magazine „Kunstforum“ that Fink produced in the 1980s. The motifs printed on the pages form an exemplary cross-section of the art world’s workings, they show exhibition views as well as photos of contemporary pieces of art, full-page ads and pages upon pages of text. Tone Fink adds his personal view of the world to this reserved view of contemporary art production.

The overdrawings and overpaintinga are certainly independent motifs that emancipate themselves from the content of the pages they are created on. But it is the combination of the drawings with the underlying elements of the art magazine whose fragments appear in the background that give the pieces their extraordinary tension – the tension between the technical reproduction of an artwork and an artist’s direct gesture, between contemporary art as a massive system and the autonomous artistic production of a single artist, between the world of the recipient and the world of the author.

Excerpts: Mag. Andrea Neidhöfer, Titania Seidl