Mathias Poledna

Indifference

6 February 2020 -
29 February 2020

opening reception on Thursday,
6 February, 6-8 pm

Mathias Poledna

 

Indifference

 

6 - 29 February 2020
Opening on Thursday, 6 February, 6-8 pm

 

Galerie Buchholz is pleased to announce our sixth solo exhibition of the artist Mathias Poledna, his second exhibition in our New York gallery. Indifference brings together an installation of Poledna’s recent 35mm film of the same title with two new groups of works on paper.

 

Poledna’s film work Indifference (2018), presented here for the first time in the United States, further advances the artist’s ongoing inquiry into modernity’s visual imaginary. The film unfolds as a series of brief, hallucinatory scenes set in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the cusp of World War I. It details in elegant restraint the seemingly mundane routine of a single protagonist played by French actor Alain-Fabien Delon. His character - an Austrian officer / aristocrat - is drawn from types common in German-speaking fin-de-siècle literature, as well as from historical dramas and period films produced in the Cold War era. While evocative of the larger backdrop of traumatic modernization and conflict in early 20th century European history, Poledna’s film forgoes a broader narrative focusing instead on the transient and disjointed.

 

Intimating the aesthetics of surface, kitsch and the melodramatic, the work purposely fuses historical specificity with a sense of ambiguity. Shot on locations in Paris, France it employs particular sites - the Jardin du Luxembourg and its romantic Baroque Fontaine Médicis - as stand-ins for places in historic Habsburg Vienna. A common thread in Poledna’s film work, Indifference draws from contiguous art practices such as painting and literature, as well as from popular culture, in particular explorations of history in genre and auteur film. The film’s soundtrack is modelled on post-synchronization characteristic of co-productions in post-war European cinema  excerpts from popular 19th-century music by Josef Strauss, Johann Strauss II and of symphonic works by Gustav Mahler recorded by Pierre Boulez.

 

For the exhibition, the presentation of Indifference is set against two seemingly unconnected groups of works on paper: a suite of pencil drawings featuring a grid-like composition in an open-ended number of permutations; and a group of collages of printed pages from a vintage operation manual by German printing press manufacturer Heidelberg mounted on sheets on animation paper. Both groups inconclusively evoke tenets of 20th century modern art. Acutely dissimilar from the film conceptually and formally, their joint arrangement in the exhibition suggests a contextual horizon in which works are continuously framed and re-framed through each other’s presence.

 

Indifference premiered at the Liverpool Biennial 2018. A catalogue on Indifference will be published by MUMOK, Vienna this year. In Spring 2020, Poledna’s work will be a part of the Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum and Huntington Gardens, Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2015), the Austrian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Secession, Vienna (2013); and Mathias Poledna/Florian Pumhösl at Raven Row, London (2011). Group exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial 2018; “Dreamlands” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); the Sydney Biennale, Sydney, Australia (2014); “Modernologies” at MACBA Barcelona (2009-2010), and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art (2006).

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (# 57,616)”, 2020
color pencil on paper
75 x 55 cm
installation view
Galerie Buchholz, New York 2020

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (# 57,616)”, 2020
color pencil on paper
75 x 55 cm

Mathias Poledna

Indifference
installation view
Galerie Buchholz, New York 2020

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (# 58,542)”, 2020
color pencil on paper
75 x 55 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (# 58,561)”, 2020
color pencil on paper
75 x 55 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (# 58,542)”, 2020
color pencil on paper
75 x 55 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (# 58,564)”, 2020
color pencil on paper
75 x 55 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (# 58,563)”, 2020
color pencil on paper
75 x 55 cm
installation view
Galerie Buchholz, New York 2020

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (# 58,563)”, 2020
color pencil on paper
75 x 55 cm

Mathias Poledna

Indifference
installation view
Galerie Buchholz, New York 2020

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Indifference)”, 2020
archival pigment print on paper
160x120cm
installation view
Galerie Buchholz, New York 2020

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Indifference)”, 2020
archival pigment print on paper
160x120cm

Mathias Poledna

“Indifference”, 2018
HD / 35mm film installation
6:10 min, color, sound
Aspect ratio 1.85 : 1
installation view
Galerie Buchholz, New York 2020

Mathias Poledna

“Indifference”, 2018
HD / 35mm film installation
6:10 min, color, sound
Aspect ratio 1.85 : 1
installation view
Galerie Buchholz, New York 2020

Mathias Poledna

“Indifference”, 2018
HD / 35mm film installation
6:10 min, color, sound
Aspect ratio 1.85 : 1
film still

Mathias Poledna

“Indifference”, 2018
HD / 35mm film installation
6:10 min, color, sound
Aspect ratio 1.85 : 1
film still

Mathias Poledna

“Indifference”, 2018
HD / 35mm film installation
6:10 min, color, sound
Aspect ratio 1.85 : 1
film still

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, pages 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
eighteen parts, each 53 x 45 x 3 cm
detail, installation view
Galerie Buchholz, New York 2020

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, pages 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
eighteen parts, each 53 x 45 x 3 cm
detail, installation view
Galerie Buchholz, New York 2020

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 37)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 39)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 41)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 43)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 45)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 47)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 49)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 51)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 53)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 55)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 57)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 59)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 61)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 63)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 65)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 67)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 69)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 71)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, pages 28, 30)”, 2020
collage on animation paper two parts, each 53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 28)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 30)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 11)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm
installation view
Galerie Buchholz, New York

Mathias Poledna

“Untitled (Heidelberg Single-Color Offset Press, page 11)”, 2020
collage on animation paper
53 x 45 x 3 cm