Aribert von Ostrowski
WIR SUCHEN DIE GUTEN Rosa Blu
13 January – 20 February 2000
Aribert von Ostrowski (born 1953, lives in Munich) presents a Janus-faced perspective on his work in his solo exhibition entitled WIR SUCHEN DIE GUTEN Rosa Blu at the Kunstverein München. Looking backward on the one hand and forward on the other, his exhibition brings together works from the last twenty years - from drawings and wall works to photocopies and site-specific installations. This form of "retroperspective" arises from the desire to find a balance between memory and recollection on the one hand and the utopian on the other.
A careful look from the outside into the ground-level café area of the Kunstverein confronts a material that was central to Ostrowski's works of the 1980s - cardboard. Then - a few steps further, leaving the entrance to the Kunstverein behind - one changes perspective and now finds oneself inside a cardboard box. Birdsong still half binds you to the outside space, but at the same time reinforces the feeling of now sitting in a cage. A set piece from the courtyard garden, the Kunstverein's inner-city reference point, is now found in the interior, leaving an empty space on the outside. This interplay of signs with the history of the exhibition site and its architectural conditions, which is characteristic of Ostrowski's site-specific installations, is continued in an integrative installation encompassing all rooms and consisting of old and new works, which together form an active image archive and also refer to the presence of the viewer. Clippings and enlargements from job advertisements (WIR SUCHEN DIE GUTEN) spread out on the floor, fruit crates (Rosa Blu) serve as material from which trees are piled up or houses are carpentered ... An apparent idyll is juxtaposed with the bitter reality of market-based selection procedures.
With his methodology of "retroperspective" Aribert von Ostrowski includes in his exhibition all the development phases of his work, which he has consistently continued since 1978. These contributions by Ostrowski, which are important for the Munich art scene and the new German sculpture of the eighties, are thus put in a new light.
A series of lectures will take place in conjunction with the exhibition. At this "test talk" the authors invited to contribute to the catalog will report on their approaches: 28.01. Helmut Draxler, 11.02. Susanne Prinz, 17.02. Heinz Schütz. The publication takes the exhibition as its starting point and will therefore be published after the exhibition.
Installation views: Aribert von Ostrowski, WIR SUCHEN DIE GUTEN Rosa Blu, Kunstverein München, 2000. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V., Photos: Wilfried Petzi.