David Gruber

David Gruber

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Born 1989 in Linz, lives and works in Vienna.

→davidgruber.net

MIART, Milan

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EXILE returns to MIART with a presentation of works by Kazuko Miyamoto, born 1942, Gwenn Thomas, born 1943, Brishty Alam, born 1988, and David Gruber born 1989.

In her move from painting to early string construction work, Kazuko Miyamoto replaced the confined space of the canvas for the architectural  expanse of her studio wall at 117 Hester Street. This move transformed the inconspicuous brick from a motif, as in the painting Progression of Rectangles (1969), into a site of measurement, structure, and spatial intervention. The visual field, in its immediacy and transparency, harbours a complexity that tends to spill from under its allocated borders or limits. The presentation expands on this very quality.

David Gruber’s paintings oscillate between the tactile immediacy of the microphone and the abstract detachment of material landscapes, employing pigment and composition to effect a kind of alchemical transmutation—rendering the familiar intangible.

A similar convergence of media occurs in the photographic practice of Gwenn Thomas, where the chemical processes intrinsic to photography extend the perceptual capacities traditionally associated with painting.

Whereas Brishty Alam furthers this trajectory through sculpture, translating the painterly surface into synthetic polystyrene forms that assert a presence at once corporeal and otherworldly. In each case, the painterly fails to remain a fixed category and is treated as a mutable field—expanded, translated, and reconfigured across material, spatial, and conceptual registers.

→Kazuko Miyamoto

→Gwenn Thomas

→Brishty Alam

→David Gruber

Solid Mesh

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Solid Mesh explores the cold, innate qualities of everyday reality, challenging the feeling of powerlessness when facing structures and currents far beyond the scale of the individuals who encounter them. Mesh is innately solid, yet by exaggerating or dramatising its inherent qualities, a whole new world unfurls – one filled with material becomings and planetary complicities.

Has the world stopped, or have we just learned to move along its axes?

With his Performance series, David Gruber approaches the image as a space of active engagement, aligning the paintings in visual choreographies where the depicted subject matter – the textured surfaces of microphone mesh – becomes a surprising point of symbolic contention. The microphones function both as symbolic figures and material environments. They are embedded into abstract landscapes or create their own and, as such, bridge the phantasmagorical dimensions of performance and spectacle with the intense interiority of matter itself. Performance, in this sense, is not about the familiar and resonant but of the eschewed and otherworldly – the unimagined or rarely seen.

The paintings in the show, more than endpoints of creative endeavour or aesthetic experience, present scenes or stages for an active re-negotiation of their relationship with the viewer, eventually turning the “mic” onto the audience themselves. Meanwhile, the sculptures and drawings by Brishty Alam draw on the structural features of everyday reality to deliver material forms that act ever more autonomously – instilling their effects onto a broader aesthetic regime.

Alam’s work explores the material dynamics of shapes and designs associated with scientific equipment, like chemistry flasks and reaction chambers. With her processual approach to art-making, often referencing and reusing drawings, sketches, calculations, and graphs, her work gains a modular quality that resonates with her attention to the abstract and transformative potential of parts and particles. Another white solid references the mundane reality of chemical compounds, which seems tied more to stasis or immutability than wondrous transmutation. Yet, in their structural depths, these forms nonetheless reveal strange and compelling worlds, each with its own intricate poetics and sense.

Between the two practices, change comes gradually – from within solid, at times whimsically rigid, forms. As such, however, it expresses the possibility of transformation of even the most unyielding structures and systems – whether scientific codes of knowledge production or the societal regimes and attention economies that dictate who gets to speak and when. Solid Mesh accepts the cold embrace of material reality, in which one cannot help but feel small and powerless. Yet, just as the zoomed-in, micro-perspective of the microphone mesh in the Performance paintings or the textures and fissures within Another white solid dance dangerously on the edge of becoming their opposites, the subtle voices of material landscapes – their fields of intensity – anticipate a shift in our own embodied perspectives and, through that, an alternative vision of what’s to come.

Domen Ograjenšek

 

Brishty Alam (born in London, lives and works in Vienna) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and holds a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Her exhibitions include Palais des Beaux Arts Wien (2024); Baba Vasa’s Cellar, Shabla, Bulgaria (2024); SET Kensington, London (2024); Lady Liberty Library, Berlin (2024); Ve.Sch, Vienna (2024); the Office, Vienna (2023); Belvedere 21 – Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna (2023); Festival der Regionen, Lungitz/Gusen (2023); GOMO, Vienna (2023); Memphis, Linz (2022); Neuer Kunstverein Wien (2022); Ajker, Tati, London (2022); French Riviera, London (2021); Haus Wien(2021); Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw (2019); and Center for Contemporary Arts Celje (2019). Her works are part of the collections of the Austrian Federal Arthotek and the Wien Museum.

David Gruber (born in Linz, Austria, lives and works in Vienna) studied painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna with Prof. Judith Eisler and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt with Prof. Monika Baer and Prof. Amy Sillman. Recent exhibitions include Maebashi Art Practice, Maebashi, Japan (2024); Klausgasse, Vienna (2024); UA26, Vienna (2023); EXILE, Vienna (2022); and Trust, Vienna (2021).

Domen Ograjenšek (born in Celje, Slovenia, lives and works in Vienna) is a writer and curator specialising in contemporary visual art. Her writing has been featured in art magazines and online platforms such as PASSE-AVANT, Artalk, Blok Magazine, Fotograf Magazine, all-over Magazine, etc. Magazine, Maska Magazine, ŠUM Journal, Borec Journal, Tribuna and Radio Študent. Her curatorial projects include exhibitions at Aksioma –Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana; New Jörg, Vienna; Ravnikar Gallery Space, Ljubljana; Center for Contemporary Arts Celje; Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana; Kresija Gallery, Ljubljana, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, SCCA Ljubljana, and Museum of Madness, Trate.

Rare Earth Magnet

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Rare       Earth     Magnet

Rapid     Eye        Movement

Dear Visitor,

I am writing this text that was commissioned for the exhibition Rare Earth Magnet by Gwenn Thomas with inserts by David Gruber and Alexander Jackson Wyatt while looking out of a window, thousands of kilometres removed.

I browse the streets attached to information zipped down from an immaterial sphere while colliding not only with my fellow walkers. My walk became directed the further I am in need of rare earth circuit boards as an organ permanently affixed to my palm. The world is my oyster, or so I am told, the window in my hand is my hand. On my path, I am an atom, colliding and producing information out of information.

In order to quiet my restlessness I open a book I never finished reading. The page the bookmark is left on, begins with a sentence I now decide to quote: “All of a sudden, as if a surgical hand of destiny had operated on a long-standing blindness with immediate and sensational results, I lift my gaze from my anonymous life to the clear recognition of how I live.” Written in 1930, published in 1982, in 1994 the sentence brought my reading to a stop, in 2022 I am caught by its poignant description of the contemporary human condition.

Thomas’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, includes inserts by two invited artists, with me, as the writer of this commissioned text, as the inevitable fourth participant. The flawless digital presentation of the works I received weeks ago is hovering in another window on my screen. Let me introduce, frame, create connection and meaningful content of the displayed works. I try to imagine the works’ collective physicalities, presence and setting within the white-walled gallery space I never visited.

Alchemic experimentations of color, shape and form, collectively considering the inner perspective in relation to an orbiting, partially fractured marginal frame. My device is seriously failing me, not connecting the atomic fractions of content orbiting around my mind. These are restless times and in accelerating speed, do you also feel as in constantly fracturing explosive fear? My job to introduce, to create context and to formulate in times that can’t be formulated I fail to fulfill.

It all began with a collision. A sudden, seemingly unimportant encounter, be it emotional or physical, results in a drastic change of course. At highest speed, particles collide. The mundane shape of a window seen a decade ago in my hometown of Lisbon, has burnt itself into the work of Gwenn Thomas. The artist’s windows into the self are deeply explored by new alchemist experimentation of glittering formulas of precious glass. As much fragile as infinite, these intricately precious, yet mundane materials held in metal encasements allow for the light of day to reflect its glittering mystery caught within. Metallic gold photographic paper, expired over two decades ago, is painted upon with chemicals revealing shapes and structures that abstract the three-dimensional Rare Earth shapes found in the gallery space.

Reassembled frames from frames filled with collaged content from previous content, somewhat precariously held together. Alexander Jackson Wyatt’s inserts into the exhibition are as individual as they are repetitious variations of form. The casual fragility of the collage is juxtaposed by a frame made up of seemingly discarded parts of wood. The frame makes its presence known, not unlike a medieval protective wall, sheltering the fleeting collage from all outside elements. The result is a battle for attention between margin and centre, between exposure and protection.

Sections of left-over beige frames, seemingly held together by painted brown tape are attached to beige paintings of almost classic comic appearing grey explosive devices. With their explosion near, the bombs circle towards a black abyss, smoke appears. David Gruber’s inserts into the exhibition allure to the precariousness of individual mental states. These paintings are like clairvoyants predicting what we all know all too well.

Obsessive repetition, repetitive obsession. Alchemist experiments, paintings of gold, collaged fortresses, explosive disasters with no miracle cure at hand. Looking out of a window as if a crystal ball into meaning and content, I am certain you will find your own sense, your own conversation with the works and their relation to ourselves.

“It was just a moment, and I saw myself.”

Yours faithfully,

O. Seraos

→Windows in our hands. Review by Robin Wart published by passe-avant.net

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