User:Triptychon6/Martin Gostner

Martin Gostner
Martin Gostner
	Martin Gostner (2019)
Born	5 November 1957; Innsbruck, Austria
Education	Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Known for	sculpture, visual art

Martin Gostner (born 5 November 1957 in Innsbruck) is a austrian visual artist. He lives and works in Düsseldorf und Innsbruck.

Since 2004 Martin Gostner holds a professorship for sculpture at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Life and work

Gostner studied painting with Arnulf Rainer and Max Weiler at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. After his studies, he turned away from pure painting and worked in the media with installation, film, painting and photography. The main topics are fundamental cultural criticism and artistic biography, making use of knowledge from psychology, philosophy, politics and history.

The investigation of history and memory functions as a vital pivot and focal point in Martin Gostner’s artistic oeuvre since 1987, which encompasses sculptural approaches as well as sounding out a wide range of linguistic and communicative forms. Despite his interest in the history of things he does not forget the present day, by any means, but focuses on the traces of more recent history left behind in the world – due to both short traumatic events and long-lasting developments. Gostner’s works, each in its own specific way, express the inner necessity to highlight these traces, which have become imprinted into individual as well as collective memory.

However, by contrast to academic studies of history, Gostner does not work on a history of facts, aiming to decipher and explain the past on the basis of various chains of events. His approach seems to react far more to the way in which historical terrain is structured – as an immeasurable store, so to speak, of personal and social memories, which appear chaotic and fragmented when overlapping, but are organised from a neuroscientific point of view into multipart networks encircling engrained nodes in the memory of the individual. As such, they are always present in some way, but often submerged.

Since 2001 Gostner has been working also apart from art scene on a complex in a state of permanent development going by the name of Erkerkultur or ‘oriel culture’. Gostner does not primarily, however, make use of the oriel as an architectural device but as a term for an individual system of thought with which he describes interventions in the genius loci of selected locations. Although he transforms the term into a personal figure of thought he derives the latter’s meaning from collective conventions of space and usage. As a metaphor for space, the oriel represents a hybrid space familiar to almost all cultures, one that is an archetypal example of something linking two worlds – an inside world and an outside one. The oriel juts into one world but also out of one. In terms of its usage, the oriel is a place where life and time enhance each other. It is a place where people find rest and can reflect, one that offers them a safe view of the world, a view where people also often collect souvenirs of events important to them. It is these connotations with architecture and with existence that allow us to understand the oriel as the kind of structure by means of which, as Gostner sees it, flexible movements between different times and spaces become possible.

In formal terms, Gostner’s oriels are generated from his highly diverse repertoire of artistic practices. These include poster work, painting, photographic, textual and pictorial works, sculptures and installations. Fundamental characteristics of the oriel are its indissoluble bond with its location and its independence from the conventions of the exhibition business. With the exception of things derived from it, the oriel defies the institutional rules of presentation and communication. Gostner provides the art cognoscente with indications of existing interventions but never until after they have been realized. Either people come across the work by chance or they have to look for it using GPS coordinates. Inspired by the first known graffiti tagger, namely Viennese alpinist Josef Kyselak (1799-1831), who left his name in all possible and impossible locations, Gostner installs his oriels in places that are entirely of his own choosing, places completely in line with his interest. These places often have nothing special about them at first glance. They are ordinary urban spaces, stretches of forestation, fields, patios, offices, but they are also places with a specific aura resulting from the fact that something special has happened, is happening or will possibly happen in them in the future.

A good example of this is Oriel of the Blue Horses (realized on May 31, 2012). By means of four piles of horse dung cast in plastic on the patio of Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin the intervention makes it credible in an almost physical way that the horses from Franz Marc’s painting The Tower of the Blue Horses (1913) have returned to the present – a painting that was in the possession of the Nationalgalerie until, during the Nazi era, Hermann Göring confiscated it for his own collection, since when it has disappeared.