Walter Pichler
Plattform über dem Bach
Museion Passage
The artist, who died in 2012, never saw the platform created. The exhibition at Museion Passage illustrates the project, from conception to realization, through various unpublished materials by the artist and a selection of photographs.
It is a square four by four meters wide. The floor is made of larch, the load-bearing structure is made of red-brown lacquered steel. It does not have a particular function, but every detail is made with the utmost precision. The “Platform on the stream” was conceived by Pichler as an integral part of a complex together with the house wanted by the artist near his paternal grandfather’s forge. This house is described as a house-monument, an ideal project, of which memory and remembrance are the raw material. The platform desired by Pichler to complete the house appears like an accurate and ingenious declaration of non-functionality. It doesn’t lead anywhere, it doesn’t fulfill any particular task - except to open a point of view on the stream. In this sense, the work can be compared to another similar construction created by the artist, namely the platform designed in the early 1990s for the garden of the Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna.
Coming from the current of Viennese utopian architecture, Pichler moves on the boundaries between sculpture, art and drawing. As always in his work, the buildings are not just architecture, but also works of art. House and platform are therefore sculptures, part of a total work of art, in which elementary forms and maximum technical accuracy meet, native materials and industrial designs coexist. The materials exhibited at Museion also reflect this vision: on the one hand there are the rigorous technical projects for the platform and on the other the freehand drawings, made in pencil or with natural colours.
On the occasion of the presentation of the project, a catalog (dt) with texts by Andreas Hapkemeyer and Walter Pichler published by Stahlbau Pichler, Bolzano, is presented.
Walter Pichler (1936-2012) Originally from Alto Adige, Pichler moved to Austria following the Options in 1941 and soon achieved international fame. In his work sculpture, architecture and drawing find a particular synthesis. Already in 1967 he exhibited concepts of utopian architecture together with Hans Hollein at the MOMA in New York. In 1972 he acquired the St. Martin farm in Burgenland (Austria) where he created his sculptures exclusively for himself and for his houses, without ever wanting to sell them. In 2013 his works were at the Venice Biennale in the “Palazzo Enciclopedico” exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni. The Museion collection preserves a series of twelve drawings on the “Haus in der Schlucht”, which is the basis for the subsequent creation of the “House near the forge” in Val d’Ega. In 2011 the Autonomous Province of Bolzano acquired the vast cycle of drawings exhibited at Castel Tirolo, having the artist’s mother as its subject.
Walter Pichler
Plattform über dem Bach
ExhibitionLocation: Museion Passage
Curator: Andreas Hapkemeyer
