René ZechlinCondensed Time
Jürgen TaborVienna Downbeat – On the concepts and contexts of the exhibition Untitled (Flow)
Sabine SchaschlPartially Gone with the Wind
Fiona LiewehrTransitive Network Spaces
Cliff LausonSlow Flow
Matthia LöbkeWith a Black Ink – In the Studio of Herbert Hinteregger
Walter SeidlAesthetics of Reduction
Martin PrinzhornAdditive Abstraction
Fiona LiewehrHerbert Hinteregger & Michael Sailstorfer
at Georg Kargl BOX, Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna
Jürgen Tabor“To destroy an object to create a painting”
Günther MoschigHerbert Hinteregger – Color as Presence in Space
Fiona LiewehrKoenraad Dedobbeleer/Herbert Hinteregger
A sense of disquietude concerning the existing order of things
Elisabeth FiedlerA Transmedia Reduction of Means
Works by Herbert Hinteregger
Axel Jablonski(in the world of things)
Moritz Küng“It was through a documentation which Herbert Hinteregger sent me…”
Moritz Küng
It was through a documentation which Herbert Hinteregger sent me in 1996 that I found out about the work of the artist for the very first time. I have chosen to mention this because the mentality and the unconventional presentation of his documentation irritated me somehow. A conventional blue binder with just about 25 transparent covers containing eight black and white photocopies of standard quality, two loose coloured pictures from a One-Hour Photo Shop, four printed exhibition announcements, a project sketch and a handwritten curriculum on semi-cardboard which were inserted in the binder. Eight covers contained a non-descriptive, preprinted lined paper punctured with four holes; two covers were completely empty. It was because of the sparse denseness of the information and its modest presentation that I was moved to simply negate it. However, the artificially schematic and anonymous tactile quality, the roughness and inconsistent openness of the binder gripped me. I did not know for certain how to assess this documentation. It was only later that I discovered that it was all about the individual work of Herbert Hinteregger. Shortly after, both of us teamed up to work for an exhibition in Brussels.
This would have been an anecdote, if the first work that I had seen had not clearly been a demonstration of Herbert Hinteregger’s deeds and thought processes. The work is based on the anarchic reduction principle. In his illustrations which are in Din A4 format, monochrome pictures and wall paintings, Herbert Hinteregger limits himself to the use of ball-point pens respective of their ink. He does not apply them gesticulatively like the Belgian Jan Fabre does, but in a paintlike fashion. The tough texture of the liquid ink is either squeezed out of his husk onto the drawings, or is applied layer by in its original manufactured state, onto the screen. The motives are orientated by the vocabulary of geomatrical abstraction, relate to organic forms and in a way, appear to be romantic and autistic.
The works of Herbert Hinteregger reveal the vision of an ‘entleerte Tiefe’, an ‘emptied depth’. The insertion of transparent folders somehow slows down the efficient portrayal, increases the volume and at the same time augments the dramaturgy of reading. The wall paintings are of one or more parallel horizontal lines flowing towards each other from the wall of painted on ball-point pen ink, and effectively appear to be similarly compact in their definition of space and simultaneoulsy, in the way they function as a form of measure. Simultaneously they characterize a certain distance that possesses a transcendental quality. The contemporary and partly large-formatted monochrome pictures confront the eye of the beholder with an iridescent surface, a dark and a mother-of-pearl coloured glaze that appears to withdraw from the focusing eye which at the same time serves as an abstracting mirror of reality. Herbert Hinteregger’s works are typified by the manner in which he spreads space and orientates himself within a given situation. The works assumes a contemplative quality by incorporating and subjecting to archtitectonic conditions, whereby it appears to violate the boundaries between real and fictatious dimensions.
Herbert Hinteregger questions the mediums of paintings with his still current work, be it through the use of all contemporary materials and the scrutiny of their respective tactile qualities, or the manner in which his installations respective the spill or conglomeration of leftover ball-point sockets spread through space.
His work is both ascetically concise and seductively spontaneous.
Moritz Küng