The courtyard of the Kunsthaus accommodates a sculpture called Parasite.

It consists of loops of steel wire, inextricably intermeshed but nevertheless light and sprawling at once. Parasite has occupied its place on our grounds since 2010, when it was part of the exhibition LINEA: The Art of the Line Between Antiquity and the Present. Now its author is returning to Zug with his first comprehensive solo exhibition in Switzerland: the Austrian artist Michael Kienzer (b. in Steyr in 1962) inaugurates the freshly refurbished Kunsthaus. Kienzer calls himself a sculptor even though he doesn’t spend his time chiselling stone. And indeed, one of his key concerns is: what can sculpture be today? With his show in Zug, he proposes an answer. He appropriates the building’s architecture as a sculptural whole, singles out elements that spark his interest, deconstructs and further processes them. A tension ensues between his expansive sculptures and the building’s structure and echoes in the friction between the works themselves. As if in a state of limbo, in search of equilibrium, self-contained forms encounter open ones; order and chaos interact; elegant, quiescent elements confront those of repellent aggressiveness. The artist plays with the effects of physical forces, disturbing, changing and concentrating them for his artistic investigation of spaces. Kienzer trained as a sculptor in the sculpture department at the Kunstgewerbeschule Graz. In 2005/2006 he was a visiting professor of art and communicative practice at the Institute of Fine Arts and Media Art of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he still lives and works today. He has been exhibiting his work in Austria and abroad since 1984. In Zug he presents new works, engages with the specific conditions of the museum’s spaces – and enters into dialogue with an important representative of the Kunsthaus Zug collection: the Viennese sculptor Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975). Even if the two sculptors never met in person, Wotruba has had a formative influence on his younger colleague. Concurrently with the exhibition in Zug, the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus in Bremen will also be featuring works by Kienzer; a joint publication accompanies the two shows.

Curated by Matthias Haldemann