KÖRPERZEICHEN IV

With the exhibition KÖRPERZEICHEN IV, Galerie Ruberl continues a series of exhibitions that has taken place at irregular intervals since 2017.

Since the late 1960s, the body has established itself as a central means of expression within the international avant-garde. Artists began to use their own bodies as a site for negotiating social, psychological, and media-related questions. Between performance, photography, and painting, a form of art emerged that no longer merely represents, but acts, inscribes, and transforms.

In Austria, this development found a particularly radical expression in Viennese Actionism. Artists such as Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler used their own bodies as material in order to challenge social norms, taboos, and the limits of perception. Within this context, Günter Brus’s self-paintings also emerged, in which the body becomes a pictorial surface. Paint covers skin, space, and object alike—the body is marked, transformed, and at the same time called into question in its physical presence.

Irene Andessner expands this discourse with a contemporary perspective. In her series Cyberface (1998), her own body becomes a projection surface that operates between reproduction, manipulation, and control. In doing so, she early on points to questions that have since gained urgency in the context of digital image worlds and artificial intelligence. The portrait is deliberately staged and appears as a flexible, codable system. It becomes the statement of a replicant specializing in self-portraiture.

Arnulf Rainer uses photography as a point of departure to make physical and psychological states visible. In his photographic series—the Face Farces and Body Poses—he employs his own body as the medium of an expressive “theatre of the body.” Facial expression, distortion, and physical tension are deliberately produced, captured photographically, and subsequently intensified through graphic and painterly interventions. This reworking does not serve correction, but rather the intensification of an expression already inherent in the body.

In his later finger paintings, the body no longer appears as a motif, but directly as the executing instrument of painting. The resulting works presuppose the physical engagement of the entire body and render it indirectly visible. Here, the body is not depicted, but inscribed into the very process of creation.

Opening: April 17, 2026, 6:00–8:00 pm
The artist Irene Andessner will be present at the opening.