Salzburg Galleries – And the festival guest lures forever
Salzburg is back in top form. Not when it comes to the ball, because the cops have been winning everything on grass for years anyway. No, the city and its festivals are proving to be the ideal driving force for travelers interested in culture and art. The performances are well attended, hotel rooms are fully booked. A gratifying snapshot after years of cultural entertainment – not only for theatre, opera and concerts, but also for galleries, art fairs and museums. Galleries from the rest of Austria carry grand pianos to successful festivals, and they set up temporary nests in the city of Mozart, almost as cuckoo children for the local galleries.
Like Wienerroither & Kohlbacher and Alba from Vienna or Reinisch from Graz. To make it short: When it comes to quality and originality, the guest games are clearly inferior to the home teams. The accrochage by Wienerroither & Kohlbacher with works by Elke Krystufek, Karl Prantl or Arnulf Rainer in the KHG Kollegienkirche provokes more ennui than inspiration. At the Alba Gallery, the saying “Stay a cobbler…” proves itself once again when everyone shows Lars Eidinger’s photographs, which come across as one-dimensional Instagram shots. Reinisch presents densely hung works by well-known artists without concept or love, but particularly blatantly in the cheap supermarket ambience.
Then rather to the Salzburg institutions and galleries.
Explore the picturesque space
Mario Mauroner has closed his branch in Vienna in the course of the pandemic and is concentrating on his parent company in the cellar vaults of the residence. The successful, entertaining summer exhibition “Inspire me” explores the extended pictorial space. With works by Herbert Brandl, Juan Uslé and Anselm Reyle to Christian Boltanski, Rebecca Horn and Olafur Eliasson. The classics are remembered, such as a large-format, nuanced canvas by Uslé (122,000 euros), one of Brandl’s rare, early spray paintings (66,000 euros) or a trendy, collage-like work by Anselm Reyle (62,500 euros).
She represents the young art scene in Salzburg. Okay, maybe together with the Elektrohalle Rhomberg. Sophia Vonier opened her gallery in 2019 in downtown Salzburg and, through her commitment, her exhibitions and – international – trade fair participations, she proves that there is also a very young, exciting and controversial contemporary program in the city of Mozart. With the show “Fender” by Julia Haugeneder, she evokes memories of summer bathing joys from her youth. The artist not only covered the floor of the gallery with swimming pool foil, but also installed the foil overhead as a tent roof. The inimitable smell of the plastic film evokes this memory. Haugeneder hung her bold “Foldings” on the walls on hooks from sailing boats – hence the title of the show.
It is thanks to him that Salzburg is on the roadmap of the international art circus: Thaddaeus Ropac. Its magnificent exhibition rooms in the Villa Kast near the Mirabell Gardens convey a sovereign, modern museum feeling. The feeling is amplified when exhibitions such as Sean Scully’s The Shadow of Figuration are on the agenda. In his exhibition conceived for Salzburg, the Irish-born master presents new works from his series “Wall of Light” and “Fixed Network”. Scully, who sometimes coquettishly claims that he “likes to paint ugly,” often misleads superficial viewers of his canvases. He tries – especially in the “Wall of Light” series – to bring those visitors who are only impressed by the pronounced color surfaces closer to the works. They should, like boy scouts, track down the intense and delicate color lines between the supposedly monochrome surfaces. Unruly color lines that try to escape from the earthy, dark surfaces. A stupendous voyage of discovery. An unexpected highlight of the show is the “Indoor Sleeper” sculpture made from old, unusual railway sleepers. Scully places the massive, meter-high, charred thing exactly in front of the exit to the Mirabell Gardens, thus making it impossible to enjoy the charming, lovely view of the baroque green area, composed with millimeter precision. Big cinema.
Speaking of cinema: a visit to the Personale by Bill Viola in the Museum der Moderne is a must. Hardly anyone knows how to stage moving images as impressively as the video magician from New York. In his cinematic dramaturgy, artistic discoveries of slowness, (almost) every detail is right: from the shooting angles and camera work to the staging of the people. Cultural tourists should escape the hustle and bustle of the festival and surrender to Viola’s cosmos for a while.