Heimo Zobernig

Heimo Zobernig was born in 1958 in Mauthen, Carinthia, Austria. From 1977 to 1980 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and from 1980 to 1983 at the University (then College) of Applied Arts, Vienna. After a visiting professorship at the Hochschule für bildende Kunst, Leipzig (1994-95) and a professorship at the Städelschule Frankfurt a. M. (1999-2000) in Germany, he was professor of sculpture at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, from 2000 to 2021.
Heimo Zobernig is one of Austria's most internationally renowned and successful contemporary artists. Since the late 1970s, the artist has participated nationally and internationally in numerous group and major events. Internationally renowned art and cultural institutions have dedicated solo exhibitions to him, including the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok), a "mid-career survey" in 2002 that was taken over by the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, and the K21 in Düsseldorf, Germany. http://www.heimozobernig.com/bio.htm
The artist participated twice in Documenta, in 1992 (IX) and 1997 (X). In 2015, he represented Austria at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.
The Generali Foundation Collection - Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg - owns a representative body of his work.
In 1993, Zobernig was awarded the Otto Mauer Prize, and in 1997 the Prize for Fine Arts of the City of Vienna. In 2009, he was honored with the Golden Decoration of Honor for Services to the City of Vienna. In 2010 he received the Austrian Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and Art and in 2016 the Roswitha Haftmann Prize. Heimo Zobernig lives and works in Vienna.

Zobernig started out in the late 1970s as a stage designer and performer. By the mid-1980s he was painting abstract images and seeking ways to interpret geometric mechanisms. Exploring colors and traditional systems, he developed a new personal color theory. Zobernig questions the basic conditions that frame art. He takes a critical approach towards regulatory systems that have been handed down for generations and he reacts pragmatically to given requirements. Much in the manner of the minimalist art of the 1960s, his work displays a clear, reduced lan-guage of forms while deliberately subverting its typical perfectionism. He prefers industrial mate-rials such as pressboard and paints in a customary DIY market quality of an unsentimental, aes-thetically unpretentious economy. Many of his sculptures evoke a sense of being used.
Heimo Zobernig has been associated with the Generali Foundation though a series of common projects. In his exhibition at the former office and showroom in 1991, he confronted the patrons with several sculptures in the shape of stand-up bar tables, each top painted in a different color. He painted the logo of the Generali Foundation, by hand, onto the green construction net cover-ing the façade of the new exhibition building, which was then under reconstruction, a task made doubly difficult by the fact that the painting had to be done in an irregular, i. e., inverted manner and in accord with the dimensions of the façade. On the occasion of the opening of the new house, he fashioned a poster on which again he placed a large-sized logo, with the four colors of the print deliberately out of register. For the restaurant at the former "Habig hat shop," he cre-ated mirror-top tables.