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Exhibition at the Georg-Kolbe-Museum

The New York artist Fabián Marcaccio was awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture 2011. The ceremony took place at the Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz. The prize, endowed with €15,000, was presented by the governing Mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, a member of the Advisory Board of the Bernhard Heiliger Foundation.

On this occasion, the Georg-Kolbe-Museum shows an exhibition entitled FABIÁN MARCACCIO - THE STRUCTURAL CANVAS PAINTANTS until 20 November 2011.

The Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture has been awarded by an independent panel of experts since 1999. The prize recognizes a sculptural work that is independent of the fashions of the art market, has sustainable substance, and has already made a significant contribution to sculpture or the concept of sculptures.

Previous laureates are Bertrand Lavier (1999), Fritz Schwegler (2003) and Antony Gormley (2007). This year, the jury comprised Udo Kittelmann, Director of the National Gallery in Berlin, Prof. Dr. Raimund Stecker, Director of the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, as well as Dr. Anda Rottenberg, independent curator and former director of the National Gallery Zacheta of Contemporary Art in Warsaw.

Fabián Marcaccio, born in 1963 in Rosario de Santa Fe in Argentina, has lived and worked for more than 20 years in New York. His works have been shown at the Biennial of Seville and in exhibitions at MAM Miami Art Museum and in New York's PS1 Contemporary Art Center. In Germany he mainly became known through solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein and the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, and by his participation in Documenta XI and in the group exhibition "What's New Pussycat?" at the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main.

Since the early 1990s, Fabián Marcaccio has been engaged in the survey and extension of the classical image term. In his "Paintant" - a neologism from the words "painting" and "mutant" - the concepts of painting, sculpture and object art merge. The biologically connotated name of a "mutant painting" serves as an umbrella term for a variety of artistic practices, which dissolve the boundaries of the nature of the panel painting in terms of both content and form. He even speaks in the context of the installations and sculptural tendencies of his work from an "expanded field of painting," in which an active, spatially- and temporally-based viewer's participation is required.

His work was intended as "action painting for the beholder," as the "action painting" of Jackson Pollock describes an act of painting relating to movement.

In a new working group, the "Structural Paintant Canvas", for which he was awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture, Marcaccio engages contemporary topics such as politics, economy and society. These include globalization, bank crashes, transsexuality, genetic engineering, terrorism and the role of the media. A dense grid of aluminum, which is associated with screen-printed parts, whose pattern was calculated in a complex 3-D process on the computer, serve as the media. Combining the two materials produces the "structural screen," with which Marcaccio articulates both their plastic formability as well as the constructive aspect of their spatial joining.

The artist compares the process with that of a tailor, customizing a textile surface onto a body. The paint material, applied later, gives the transient structures, intangible moments, like the effect of movement in the comic strokes. The surfaces are shown in the state of a running process of transformation, where the plastic form is shown as complete, but also presented as visually vulnerable.

The Bernhard Heiliger Foundation engages, in addition to presenting the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture, in the promotion of upcoming sculpturs through the “Freundeskreis” network established in 2003.

11 September – 20 November 2011

Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Sensburger allee 25, 14055 Berlin

www.georg-kolbe-museum.de
www.bernhard-heiliger-preis.de