Paul Horn: Why always me?

17. November 2011 - 21. January 2012

Why always me? A question everybody has asked eventually his or herself after an unpredictable experience. But for Paul Horn, an austrian based artist working with various media, this question doesn’t mean an egocentric inquiry, he gives his solo show at Knoll Gallery Vienna this title with ironic intent.
Once someone engages with Paul Horns works, it’s obvious that categorical thinking and fine traditions aren’t his inspiration. Rather they are a transpiration source for him which he tries to confine with blunty pretentious painting, bizarre objects and installations, or harmonically composed photographs. Paul Horns paintings are works situated at the interface between objects or assemblage. Someone can find classical portraits in terms of a pizza with a wonderful gold-brown crust made of linen, wax and spray instead of a wooden gold frame. They are supplied to the buyer in an adequate pizza box, size 1m x 1m. It’s not necessary for the portrayed people to gaze after a certain pattern, its allowed to be authentic. For example as the joyful urinating young girl or the satisfied smiling clerk with  health fund-glasses who is presenting his most favourite chicken gently. Colours, materials, techniques and backgrounds are exceptional, but they coalesce very well to Paul Horns distinctive compositions. The big cartoon works are samplings of simple copies, virtuosic oil painting, spray-painting and different found objects like lights, fences or braids, and show borderline situations between fiction and reality.
Small pulpits built after real church pulpits,are equipped with flatscreens according to our time. They play back sections of important speeches of influential public figures in a loop, for example Stalins „About the new Soviet Constitution“, or Noam Chomskys „When Elites Fail“.
Paul Horn seems to move around aimlessly within the huge archive of daily life and art history. But his chaotic remix shows a sophisticated practice and a free inventive mind which isn’t open for constricting norm-views.
Paul Horn negates style in the sense of a lineare enhancement of a concrete traditon or school by his kind of second-hand-aesthetics which easily interweaves symbols of Pop Culture and High Culture. This reconfiguration of already existing forms and signs of our culture without compulsive classification of the thereby becoming product, describes the french curator and art critic Nochoals Bourriaus as „Postproduction“. In his book about contemporary art production he investigates how it is possible to generate originality and meaning out of this chaotic bulk of ojects, names and references that constitute our daily lives. Thereby he is focussing on the manner of practice and use, the remix, and the aesthetic language generated that way. Paul Horns works show his unconventional repertoire in this exhibition.
 

Supported by:

Austrian Cultural Forum Budapest