Galerie Kandlhofer at Art Cologne 2024

Karl Karner (b.1973 in Feldbach, Austria) lives and works in Feldbach, Austria. Karner studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna under Professor Heimo Zobernig.

Karner positions his work between the disciplines of visual arts, performance and dance theatre. Within his practice, Karner continuously discusses bodily perception and the concept of corporeality itself. These are not only related to the human body, but can yet be understood as a wide discussion of object, materiality and space. In the artist´s installations and art environments, viewers frequently become players. Such participative impulses accentuate the irony inherent in these artworks. 

From a distance, the figurative silhouette of the objects initially comes to the forefront, only to reveal upon closer inspection a multitude of diverse organic forms, inevitably drawing the viewers' gaze into the depths of surreal landscape scenes. These are partly patinated and partly covered with clay slip by the artist. The result is an aesthetically homogeneous overall impression that almost gives the sculptures a classical appearance. From their observer position, humans gaze upon an artistic amalgam of our reality, distorted almost beyond recognition, frozen in the moment of its creation.

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b.1982, Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Valenzuela completed an art history degree at the University of Chile (2004), then worked in construction while making art over his first decade in the United States. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Evergreen State College and an MFA at University of Washington (2012). He is a Professor of Art at University of California Los Angeles.

Using staged scenes and digital interventions, Valenzuela's photography, video and installation work is rooted in the contradictory traditions of documentary and fiction, at the same time, these pursuits are equally centered on a semiotic, politically engaged post-capitalist critique of social constructs and civic institutions.

His new series of works "Garabatos" shows black and white photographs inspired by Rodrigo Valenzuela's research on Latin American subcultures and the music scene during the dictatorship years in the wake of Operation Condor. Operation Condor was a CIA-led initiative that aimed to neutralize socialist aspirations in South America by creating a network of cooperation between military regimes. Through the use of archival images, magazines, and film, the artist isolates the movements of bodies from documentary images, creating a vocabulary of gestures that subsequently become sculptures that are photographed. Reminiscent of a hybrid between a museum and a theater stage, the photographs represent an attempt to replace the ideology associated with the museum as a place of canonized beauty and information with a more egalitarian and sensitive place of common knowledge or wisdom about life.