Annual Exhibitions 2021
ANALOG
AUSTRIAN AND INTERNATIONAL CERAMICS OF THE 1980s
March 20, 2021 - January 16, 2022
The exhibition offers a diverse selection of works, from the collection of 80 artists, all from the former “Austrian Gallery of Ceramics”, which has been integrated into the collection of the art museum. The exciting spectrum of the show encompasses the broad fields between sculpture, small objects, jewelry and everyday objects. Documenting their infinite variety of shapes and expression, in extraordinary creations. The collection, encompasses a diversity of over 400 works, by important national and international artists, who were active in various ceramic fields in the 1980s. From pottery to objects, reliefs and wall elements to sculpture, including highlights by Kurt Ohnsorg or Kiki Kogelnik, as well works by well-known ceramists from Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, England, Mexico and the USA, as well as examples of young designers from Austria. The Waldviertel Art Museum is showing an excerpt from this important collection.
The exhibition exposes a cross-section of the great variety of craft techniques, new forms of expression and trends, that had developed in this decade of the last century. “The guidelines of the achievements of the 80s indicate conceptual dimensions and show a trend away from traditional clichés and towards current art movements, from the environment to plastic objects of daily use ...” writes Heide Warlamis in 1984 in the catalog “Contemporary ceramics in Austria.”
The term 'Analog' stands for the juxtaposition to today's world of the 'digital' and refers to the time when real matter was formed and transformed in a comprehensible work processes.
“Ceramic art in particular speaks a global, deep ecological language that sees the world as an integral whole, into which the connection between people and the earth is burned in,” says curator B. Antoni-Bubestinger.
Prehistory and Collection
In 1981, Heide Warlamis founded the "Austrian Gallery for Ceramics" (Art Gallery, Ceramics Studio) in Vienna. The aim was to give the emerging contemporary art of ceramics a platform. However, the gallery has always been at the forefront of the comparison within international artistic movements. There were numerous presentations by artists from Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark, Great Britain, Mexico and the USA. From today's point of view, this collection is a rare testimony to an impressive artistic period that remains current in its impact.
Ceramic art is a reliable constant through all the different style phases, which not only survives all experiments, but also quite naturally, without pseudo-constructions, fulfills the claim of modernity to allow art and life to merge.