CMRK is a network of four independent institutions in Graz whose common interest lies in the conveyance of contemporary art within an international context.

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CMRK archive:
Spring 2017
Summer 2017
Autumn 2017

Ute Müller
Opening: 
07.12.2017, 6 pm
Duration: 08 12 2017 - 25 01 2018

Articulate visual bodies of sculpture and painting lead off Ute Müller’s (*1978 Graz, lebt in Wien) sensitive, delicately harmonious oeuvre. Ambivalence plays its role as an attitude and aspect of the search for form and anti-form, whether the pieces are casts of negative forms that become recognizable objects upon closer inspection, or arrangements of found items that have been slightly altered and thus charged with difference. Müller shows her sculptures on pedestals, and despite their elegance, they remain unapproachable and secretive. Even the paintings are gratifyingly open-ended; in abstraction lies a clearly sketched-out position. Life-sized canvases shimmer in a minor key, while fragmented formations resembling drawings circulate above tempera textures. Skillfully, she plays with painting, history, and reference without missing specifics as she wrestles with form, idea, and presentation. In a slow dance through Müller’s visual spaces, her attempt to grasp it all becomes palpable, although she does not reveal her cards prematurely.

Ingo Abeska
Opening: 07.12.2017, 6 pm
Duration: 08 12 2017 - 25 01 2018

Ingo Abeska (*1953 Graz), an artist specializing in drawing, goes through his loot at night: international newspapers and magazines serve as inspiration and medium for following up on rapid research with a rather terse, subconscious reaction. Drawings come together to become a kind of personal cartography, like an atlas that not only opens up its interpretation to the world of news and current developments, but can also be seen behind the events themselves. Beyond their representative positions, Abeska empathically gets into the heads and ideas of the people he depicts. Narratively concentrated, the work gives rise to images condensed into communication, emotion, and psyche. Including the artist’s self-portraits, the likenesses are also of unknown people who comprise the leviathan of society’s orderly co-existence and represent the diversity within individuals. Although he uses a sharp pen, Abeska is gentle in the way that he allows the world and its fragments to disintegrate into individual elements and the profoundly human.




Ute Müller, 2017