DEAR HEARTBEAT

The SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen is dedicating a monographic exhibition to Gerwald Rockenschaub (b. 1952 in Linz, Austria) that offers a diverse survey of his oeuvre. The Austrian-born artist is one of the most significant contemporary artists and represented his country at the Venice Biennale already in 1993.

This selection of around thirty paintings and objects from the past twenty years is largely from the Schaufler Collection, supplemented by exclusive loans from the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris and Salzburg), the Galerie Mehdi Chouakri (Berlin), and the Galerie Georg Kargl (Vienna).

The exhibition was installed in the SCHAUWERK in collaboration with the artist. Peter Schaufler and Christiane Schaufler-Münch have been collecting the work of the artist, who now lives in Berlin, for twenty years. The collectors associated with Gerwald Rockenschaub’s work their own penchant for the sensuous quality of gleaming and seeming cool surfaces and for minimalist forms and bright colors. In addition to large-format installations, the collectors have a considerable number of the artist’s characteristic film paintings, which are distinguished by radiant, clearly demarcated colors. Their most recently acquired installation, Embrace Romance of 2006, with which Rockenschaub intervened directly into the SCHAUWERK’s architecture, is the focus of the exhibition. The work consists of ten monochrome wooden boards stacked on several levels that “embrace” the space of the white cube by creating a new architectural structure.