REFLECTION – Photography through the looking glass is the fifth in the exhibition format collected, in which selected works from the Bank Austria Art Collection are viewed at regular intervals from changing thematic perspectives. This time the focus is on the media-reflective practices of photography: It is an accepted view – particularly since the conceptual trends of the 1960s – that artists have started to use photography not as a medium illustrating something, but as a self-manifestation. Nevertheless, the exhibition aims to demonstrate that photographic self-reflection and –contemplation has a tradition that goes back a long way and is still a central reflective foil in contemporary photography as well.

Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies – pioneer work for the film medium – Man Ray’s dark room experiments and Herbert Bayer’s collage-type hyperboles of reality join in a dialogue with formations of Austrian contemporary photography by Tina Lechner, Pia Mayer, Anja Manfredi and Nina Rike Springer. This photography is something “made”, a planned calculation, an autonomous artistic medium that creates reality out of itself and no longer documents it. Yet in the modern digital age of mobile phone photography, social media and Photoshop news pictures, a critical treatment and view of the pictorial medium is more imperative than ever. Self-interrogations of photography and contemplation of its capabilities, limits, deficits and its own history happens first and foremost by relating it to other artistic forms of expression such as film, dance, fashion, sculpture, graphic design, and last but not least the practices of pictorial journalism.

Artists:

Herbert Bayer
Marcel Broodthaers
Francis Joseph Bruguière
Lotte Jacobi
Hans Kupelwieser
Les Krims
Tina Lechner
Anja Manfredi
Pia Mayer
Duane Michals
László Moholy-Nagy
Eadweard Muybridge
Man Ray
Xanti Schawinsky
Nina Rike Springer
 

Curator: Lisa Ortner-Kreil

Opening: October 28th, 7:30 pm

Free entry