The Brooklyn Rail NSE: Florian Pumhösl in conversation with Yuki Higashino
Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Thursday, March 14th, of Lithosphere, Florian Pumhösl’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will be held at our 88 Eldridge Street location.
Lithosphere began as a set of preparatory drawings transposed into surface strata and then reassembled as layered reliefs. Recurrently interested in formal processes undergone in relation to terrain, Pumhösl’s latest work departs from a longstanding involvement with human land-shaping above ground to derive forms emergent in subterranean zones. The show’s title, Lithosphere, designates the planet’s outermost geological layer, existing in a state of constant, gradual transformation through subsumption of the Earth’s crust. Adapted as an orientation for painting, these works are neither directly referential of nature nor composed by way of a developmental plot, instead emphasizing surface dispersion and discrepancy as a result of underlying structural events. Marking a distinct separation from Pumhösl’s previous series, the paintings included here enact a significant transformation in the function of line.
Pumhösl has described the compositional procedures deployed throughout the show as “transmissions from the interior.” As such, the basis of the paintings’ discernment of form approximates accumulative processes in which line is neither inscriptive nor cartographic. Gone completely are the planar coordinates of representation that designate the predominately gridded spatial awareness of the compositional field. Instead, depth primarily determines contour and edge, reinforcing the paintings’ status as reliefs. In geology, contour is accidental rather than essential, and yet still intrinsically structural; form is apprehensible via process rather than outcome. The line in Lithosphere is circumstantial, a kind of anti-line that is no less indicative, a happenstance termination in additive flow. Painterly line is here transformed into subtractive renewal, absent contact between constitutive strata as opposed to partition, boundary, or delineation. The reliefs in Lithosphere realize the interior of negative space by way of building-up loss, while the active visual element, light, makes a shifting play of depth apparent. In this way they are objects of disclosure rather than manifestation, a subtle taking away visualizing a process that, ultimately, can’t be shown.
Florian Pumhösl (b. 1971, Vienna) lives and works in Vienna. Solo and two-person exhibitions of his work have been staged at Galerie UM, Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design (Prague, 2023); Schindler House, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, with Vincent Fecteau (West Hollywood, 2021); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2012); Mumok (Vienna, 2011); Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (Düsseldorf, 2010); Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg, 2009); Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2008); Neue Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2005); Centre d’édition contemporaine (Geneva, 2004); Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne, 2003); Secession (Vienna, 2000); and Salzburger Kunstverein (1998), among others. His work was featured in Documenta 12, (Kassel, 2007), São Paulo Biennial (2006) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Recently, Pumhösl’s work appeared in group exhibitions at the V-A-C Foundation (Venice), Pinault Collection (Venice), Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Haus Der Kunst (Munich), City Gallery Prague, Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach), Generali Foundation (Vienna), MACBA (Barcelona), Raven Row (London), Künstlerhaus Vienna, and Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw). He has had solo exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin and Cologne, Lisson Gallery, London, and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna. His work is in the permanent collections of Tate Modern (London), MAK – Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), MUMOK (Vienna), Generali Foundation (Vienna), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Pinault Collection (Paris), V–A–C Foundation (Moscow), BSI Collection (Lugano), and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), among others.
