Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber
Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber, founded in 2001,[1] is an Austrian group of artists consisting of sculptor Christoph Steinbrener, photographer and graphic designer Rainer Dempf and architect Martin Huber. It was founded in 2001.[1] Public projects and exhibitionsIn 2005, the Delete! project in Vienna's Neubaugasse involved covering all commercial signs (including business signs and advertising posters) with yellow paper. The subsequent project series Copy/Paste took the opposite approach: advertising, corporate logos and PR posters were made highly visible, albeit with a shift of context and deliberate misplacement. The Church of St. Ursula in Linz was transformed into a Starbucks store (Pass the Buck) during this project series. In 2008, Jesuitenkosmos concealed Andrea Pozzo's ceiling painting in Vienna's Jesuit Church beneath a modern secular heavenly structure.[2] This method of displacement resulted in the 2009 exhibition Trouble in Paradise at Vienna's Schönbrunn Zoo, for which Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber installed foreign objects (cars, toxic waste barrels, railway tracks) in the animal enclosures, highlighting the confrontation between nature and civilization. The Freeze! exhibition opened at the Vienna Museum of Natural History in June 2012; it attempted to replace the romantic view of animal and birds depictions with a realistic view of the modern conditions of growing civilization. For this show, Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber revived an old natural science display technique, the diorama. In collaboration with the museum's taxidermists, they presented snapshots of wild animals, which are usually familiar only in Internet videos or exotic travel documentaries, in urban settings. In 2015, they mounted an Ibex on the head of the 43 metres (141 ft)-tall Bismarck monument in Hamburg, drawing attention to resurgent German nationalism. The piece was titled Capricorn Two.[3][4] In 2016, almost at the same time, the Viennese artist collective inaugurated two highly conspicuous "commentaries" on the architecture of their city, the sculptures Sign of the Times (on the façade of the Hotel InterContinental) and Lunch Atop (on the roof of a Viennese high-rise).[5][6]
Studio worksSteinbrener/Dempf & Huber have created a few series of large-format photographs in recent years. One series shows images of dioramas made in collaboration with the taxidermists of the Natural History Museum in Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber's studio. In another, they developed "miniature dioramas" that also serve as three-dimensional sketches. The carefully arranged "Tierstücke" (animal pieces) in the classical 17th-century Flemish style focused exclusively on the figurative representation of mounted animals, using staged gestures and postures to unite elements that are zoologically incongruous.
Works
References
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