18.07.–15.09.2013
1 Picture in Café

Peter Fritzenwallner

Opening:
Wednesday, July 17, 2013, 8 p.m.

As part of the exhibition series in CaféCult #60 Peter Fritzenwallner is showing the installation

Creatures whose shadows couldn’t be distinguished and identified by the people in Plato’s cave, and so people didn’t even accept them on Noah’s Ark, because they weren’t mentioned on the name lists.

Sunken to the bottom of the sea,
their bodies remained unnamed.

(Nordsee ist Mordsee)

In his performative and participatory works Peter Fritzenwallner often deals with images, symbols, and signs – an explicitly visual form of communication that eludes a precise linguistic reading. The installation Creatures Whose Shadows... conveys an artistic practice that creates phenomena, which bear several aspects of meaning.

Creatures Whose Shadows... borrows from Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which people only see the outlines of shapes and thus cannot exactly classify them. Peter Fritzenwallner turns shapes, symbols, and logos from our everyday life into hybrid beings that are ambiguous and cannot be classified, and therefore cannot be scientifically placed either. The recipient is only able to recall parts of the symbols from his or her memory, but never the completely visible shape. It is precisely this participation and ambivalence of the viewer that interests Peter Fritzenwallner, since this is where for him the true enjoyment in art production and reception lies.

At the same time, the piece can also be read as a reference to the work of the museum and exhibiting in general. Objects, images, and stories are snatched from mundane everyday life, only to then be rearranged and shown against an innocent white background according to a certain idea.

Peter Fritzenwallner, born in 1983 in Mittersill, lives and works in Vienna. From 2003 to 2008 he studied painting and media art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (Johanna Kandl’s class), architecture at Vienna University of Technology from 2002-2004, and cultural and social anthropology at the University of Vienna from 2002-2005. From 2009-2010 Peter Fritzenwallner worked as Franz West’s assistant.