Klaus Mosettig is the first artist to have works on view in both gallery spaces of bechter kastowsky galerie in Vienna and Liechtenstein in parallel. The current series Typeface Corona comprises 100 drawings on paper created from April 2020 to December 2022. It is the core of the transnational exhibition project, expanded in Liechtenstein by works from other series.
Mosettig originally comes from sculpture, the dimension of time for work and work process is essential for him from early on, since 2009 preferably in the medium of drawing, which he uses conceptually and appropriately. In his serial works, the original works, by important artists* of post-war modernism such as Jackson Pollock and Josef Albers, by his daughter Lilith or also by fugitives are rebuilt in drawing.
Time is always an essential factor for the artist; it trickles away incessantly during the work of setting the strokes and expands in the process until the artist's work nears its end. In this way, Mosettig's working method also inverts the idea of the intensive act of creation and the quick copy into the opposite (Verena Gamper).
The new series Typeface Corona is again strictly conceptual. All 100 drawings created during the pandemic have the same format and the same structure - a drawing and a line of text below it, both hatched. The drawings were made from simple scribbles by Mosettig on glass panes. They were transformed to the new format by means of projector and appropriated by means of drawing pencil. So a deeply personal process, the first appropriation, by the way, of his own works. This makes particular sense when one considers the time in which they were created, a time in which we all seemed to be completely thrown back on ourselves.
Mosettig collected most of the lines of text, set in the Corona typeface, from artists and friends during this time, and also found some in the mediated world, for example in print media and social media. The scribbles as well as the texts are transferred to his time dimension through Mosettig's appropriation process.
In addition to the same structure of each of the 100 sheets, Mosettig has also stringently developed the presentation in the exhibition space. The entire hanging space of the bechter kastowsky galerie in Vienna can be divided into a grid of 1 to 100. The exhibited works are inserted into this grid according to their serial number without regard to the viewers.
In the gallery in Liechtenstein, sheets from the series Typeface Corona set the content link to the exhibition in Vienna, supplemented by drawings from previous series, so that Klaus Mosettig's working method can be placed in a work-period context.
Withdrawal is a series of drawings from the iconic Homage to the Square series that Josef Albers created from the 1960s until his death in 1976. Albers nested three to four color squares within each other in over 2000 variations; he marked the names of the colors used, which were spackled on directly, on the back of the paintings. In his examination of the subjective possibilities of perception of a strict, seemingly objective image and color concept, Albers formulated the sentence, which is also thought-provoking for the works of Klaus Mosettig: "Only appearances are deceptive.
In Mosettig's drawings, Albers' colors are translated into corresponding gray values. In contrast to the examination of Jackson Pollock's works or those of his daughter's drawings of infants between the ages of 10 and 14 months (Informel series), also the pictorial elements in the new series from the Corona period, the focus here is not on the complete reversal of the creative process, the translation of spontaneity into analysis of form. The sometimes almost disturbing power of the colors in their pictorial dialogue set by Albers is replaced by the gray values, which already seem abstract per se, and the conceptual rigor of Josef Albers' series is thus once again reinforced.
The appropriations of engravings of fugitives in plane trees on the Greek island of Leros from the series Planes from 2018 - 2020 reflect another of Mosettig's approaches. These carvings, found on site, are archaic acts that people have been setting since time immemorial. The carving of one's name serves as an assurance of being in the here and hope for eternity - indeed, we often find such names and signs centuries later. But since the bark of plane trees is always peeling off, this hope of the fugitives will be in vain, as fleeting as our attention to their fate.
Artistic appropriation as a process of understanding the world and its images, of snatching them from the fast pace of life through close observation, contextualization and transformation, which enable a new way of looking at things - that is what the work of Klaus Mosettig is capable of.
Andreas Hoffer, Curator Kunsthalle Krems