ans Schabus is from Vienna, as everyone knows since he took over the Austrian pavillion at the Venice Biennial 2005. The city he lives in has morphed in recent history from a sleek European backwater to a western frontier town as Eastern European borders opened. Stodgy old Vienna is getting some of it’s mojo back, and Hans is a part of that. He has long worked on complex interdisciplinary frontiers in art, creating hybrids and mash-ups of sculpture, architechture (as you can see above), installation and performance. His work is challenging and smart, as much so in it’s particulars as in the arc of his mid-stage career. His work is often about communicating psychological states and strategies spacially, i.e., about being an artist. But Hans’ work avoids the trap of self-referentiality because it remains based in objective correlatives of the unconscious. Imagine the young Freud, another Viennois of course, wandering around Hans’ installation (« Astronaut (be right back) ») in the main room at the Vienna Secession in 2003, or playing with trains in Hans’ atelier. At last, our Freud might think, an artist who understands my work! Maybe that’s why Hans is such a dreamer : he should have a sign that says DO NOT DISTURB ARTIST AT WORK over his head while he is sleeping. But of course he may be just taking a nap. Or he may be digging a train tunnel to the moon. Who can say, except Hans?
RICHARD DAILEY, Paris.

Check Hans Schabus’s books and multiples at onestar press

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